{"id":1943,"date":"2022-03-10T13:21:24","date_gmt":"2022-03-10T18:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/18.217.136.120\/?p=1943"},"modified":"2025-03-12T07:14:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-12T12:14:20","slug":"leaders-and-misleaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/?p=1943","title":{"rendered":"Leaders and Misleaders"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"This<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sketches of public leaders I\u2019ve known or have watched closely<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mario Cuomo (and Andrew)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/a>This profile of Mario Cuomo made him governor.<\/strong><\/a> I’m not kidding. When The Village Voice <\/em>ran it in June, 1982, during the Democratic primary campaign, he was seven points behind Ed Koch, who’d defeated him for the mayoralty five years earlier with a strong death-penalty pitch that Cuomo courageously resisted. I sketched his fascinating mind and character as well as the politics that shadowed this race. The piece turned heads by re-introducing elite liberals and leftists to an “outer borough ethnic” whom they’d spurned in 1977. I showed that Cuomo was a more brilliant, bravely grounded “liberal” than Koch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cuomo disappointed me and other supporters when he decided not to run for president and, more surprisingly, when he turned down Bill Clinton’s invitation in 1993 to nominate him to the Supreme Court<\/a>. <\/strong>Andrew Cuomo was deeply involved in his father’s prevarications on this in ways that suggested flaws in the son that seemed to me to play off of flaws in the father. When Mario Cuomo ran for a fourth term, in 1994, I wrote some less-than-generous New York Daily News<\/em> columns. He lost to moderate Republican George Pataki. When he died at 81, in 2015, I softened my still-saddened assessment <\/a><\/strong>of Mario but recalled a couple of things that had made his inability to accept Clinton’s offer especially shocking and disappointing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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George W. Bush<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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George W. Bush. <\/strong>Having known Bush slightly during our years in the same residential college at Yale, where he was president of one of my roommates’ fraternity, I had a few insights to share, along with a special photo, from my own class year book, that no one else had found, during his re-election campaign in 2004. So I wrote Bush and the Bad Boy Vote, LAT, 2004.pdf (jimsleeper.com)<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>for the Los Angeles Times.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Image\"\/
George Bush delivers illegal but gratifying right hook to an opponent in Rugby, 1966<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Ed Koch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Ed Koch’s mouth and New York’s prospects,<\/a><\/strong> Dissent <\/em>magazine, 1981. The King of New York,<\/strong> <\/a>New York Times<\/em>, Feb. 2, 2013, The column, about Ed Koch as I saw him in the early 1980s and got to know him better in the late 1990s, was written the day of his death and published a day later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rep. Fred Richmond <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Brooklyn Congressman Fred Richmond was disgraced doubly.<\/a> <\/strong>I connected both dimensions after encountering him when I was an idealistic, hapless young writer. Village Voice,<\/em> 1982 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Eliot Spitzer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Did something in the manner of NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer\u2019s fall in 2008 show that he deserved a second chance? Wayne Barrett and I discussed this on NPR\u2019s Brian Lehrer Show<\/em>. <\/strong>Breaking News: End Of An Era | The Brian Lehrer Show | WNYC<\/a> There and in this Huffington Post column, How Spitzer’s Fall Showed He Deserves a Second Chance | HuffPost Latest News<\/a>  I contended that Spitzer\u2019s self-destruction didn’t leave his investigators with clean hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Al Shanker<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Al Shanker and New York liberalism’s travails,<\/a><\/strong> Democracy Journal,<\/em> 2008<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jesse Jackson<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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 Jesse Jackson’s miscarried promise,<\/a> <\/strong>Washington Post,<\/em> 1992 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rudy Giuliani<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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New York’s Giuliani-Dinkins mayoral contest, 1993,<\/a><\/strong> Daily News<\/em> columns. Note the third column, on the Rev William Augustus Jones, a precursor of Obama’s Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Giuliani just before 9\/11<\/a>,<\/strong> New York Observer,<\/em> 2001. Why Giuliani should never have run for president or aspired to become U.S. Attorney General or Secretary of State.<\/a><\/strong> (Written for Foreign Policy<\/em> magazine when Trump was reported to be considering him for those posts in 2016. )<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harold Washington<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Chicago’s Harold Washington, larger than life, even in death,<\/a> <\/strong>Washington Post,<\/em> 1992 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Al Sharpton<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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 Al Sharpton’s struggle to pick up the pieces.<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>The New Republic,<\/em> 1996<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Man of Too Many Parts, T<\/em><\/strong>he New Yorker,<\/em> 1993<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ronald Reagan<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Ronald Reagan’s sweet songs of civic republicanism,<\/strong><\/a> History News Network<\/em> 2007 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bill Bradley<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Bill Bradley’s near-miss,<\/a> <\/strong>The New Republic,<\/em> 2005 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kingman Brewster, Jr.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Kingman Brewster, Jr. and civic-republican leadership<\/strong>,<\/a> Los Angeles Times<\/em>, 2004. As Yale’s president in my undergraduate years, he showed how to distinguish dogmatism from truth.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Larry Summers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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“Goodbye Larry Summers, Without Regrets, <\/a><\/strong>History News Network,<\/em> <\/strong>2006<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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John McCain<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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What John McCain Really Showed Us | Washington Monthly<\/a>  <\/strong>He sometimes offered the strong, supple leadership that a republic needs at moments when its fate seems to hang in the balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jonathan Schell<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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A Strong Voice for Democracy is Lost. March 26, 2014.<\/strong> My first, brief posting about his passing appeared in The Washington Monthly<\/a><\/em> <\/strong>and was picked up rapidly by AlterNet, HuffingtonPost, Bookforum, <\/em>and History News Network.<\/em> The next day I published a column in the Yale Daily News<\/strong><\/em><\/a> that was cross-published by the U.K. site openDemocracy.net<\/strong><\/a> and by History News Network<\/em>. Several people have written me since then to say that Jonathan Schell\u2019s writing, especially on nuclear arms, changed their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fareed Zakaria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Whip-smart, sometimes illuminating, but in the service of what?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Leon Wieseltier<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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A literary prophet’s bad faith<\/a><\/strong>, December, 2012<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lost in a House of Columns: Wieseltier’s new Cold War<\/a><\/strong>. The Washington Monthly,<\/em> March 2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Wieseltier’s fall reveals about Washington<\/a><\/strong> AlterNet,<\/em> Nov. 2017<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nancy Wechsler<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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An ‘Imperturbably Valiant’ Lawyer<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Barack Obama<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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The year-long civic-republican revival rally of 2008, and the challenges of 2011.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I began writing about Obama with my \u201ccivic-republican\u201d pen in 2007, tracing the arc of his rise, travails. and accomplishments. My assessments of him evolved, and you can witness that evolution by reading these columns, which are presented as they were posted during the campaign. If you\u2019re writing a book or a journal article or presentation for a conference about his presidency, you\u2019ll want to read this chronicle and assessment of his 2008 campaign, which I followed as a columnist on several websites. (See also: Obama bin Dustbin? Leaders, Great and Small<\/a><\/strong>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My columns chronicling his ascent, obstacles, and defaults.<\/a><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sketches of public leaders I\u2019ve known or have watched closely Mario Cuomo (and Andrew)  This profile of Mario Cuomo made him governor. I’m not kidding. When The Village Voice ran it in June, 1982, during the Democratic primary campaign, he was seven points behind Ed Koch, who’d defeated him for the mayoralty five years earlier with a strong death-penalty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1943"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5037,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1943\/revisions\/5037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}