The Hermanator's Leadership Test

There is obviously a big difference between a politician and a leader. As we move toward the end of the primary season here in Georgia - with the final days of voting upon us - I can sympathize with any voter who feels frustrated trying to cut through all the nonsense and identify those rare candidates who actually are seeking office because they want to be authentic leaders.

Just the other day, I received a piece of mail at my house that was so filled with falsehoods, I'd be more inclined to believe North Korean claims of landing a man on the sun! (Or the satire site that claimed they claimed that.) Clearly, this is a candidate who is not intimiately connected to the truth, and will say anything to win. That is not a characteristic of an effective leader. But what are those characteristics? I would humbly submit to you that my years of experience in business, in broadcasting and even as a two-time candidate for office have taught me a thing or two about how to recognize real leaders. Here are some of the most important things you want to be looking for:

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• When you see their campaign ad, hear them talk or listen to them in a debate, do they exhibit an understanding of the right problems? Are they asking the right questions about what needs to be done? Are they getting to the right solutions? Are they removing barriers? I talked yesterday about how a Democrat senator wants to make it more difficult for businesses to leave the United States by putting up barriers to turn it into a foreign company. That's putting up barriers. The real problem is the messed-up tax code that the business is trying to escape. So the Democrat senator is working on the wrong problem.
• Ask whether the candidate has ever actually led anything. And if they were in a leadership position, did they achieve any results? Because if they didn't achieve anything, that's what I call "positionship." They were not there to lead. They were there to hold the position. People who have the capacity to lead will generally have some track record of real leadership already. If they don't, you would be right to be skeptical about their capacity to exercise real leadership in the political arena.
• If you receive in the mail an attack piece on someone's opponent, it ought to send up a whole lot of red flags. One of the things that's sickening about politics is that any of the political professionals - people who do this all the time and bounce from campaign to campaign - all believe in negative attacks. They believe, based on their experience, that negative attack ads work. But we don't really know that. Many political scientists have studied the issue but there is no conclusive evidence of it.

I've seen two negative attacks in the last week on David Purdue, who is running for the Senate in Georgia. I know David Purdue, so I happen to know that everything in these attacks is false. But you don't have to know someone personally to find out the truth. There are many ways these days of getting the real facts. This happened to me when I was running for the Senate in Georgia. Days before the election, a hit piece directed toward me was dropped in every mailbox in Georgia. The piece made a false claim that I supported something I did not support, and then also claimed I had contributed to "Kerry's campaign," implying that I had supported the presidential campaign of John Kerry. Well, I hadn't. Back in the 1990s, when I first moved to Nebraska, I supported a guy named Bob Kerrey for Senate - and yes, he was a Democrat. At that time I was president of the National Restaurant Association, and Kerrey was a restaurateur who understood our industry, so I supported him. When he went to Washington and started drinking the Democrat Kool-Aid, and acting like Harry Reid, I stopped supporting him. But that was Kerrey, not Kerry. I had never supported John Kerry and I never would. But what could I do, two days before the election, to counter that lie? Not much. So if you get a negative hit piece at this point, you should seriously question the person doing the attacking. Because somewhere embedded in that piece there could be some deception, and some flat-out lies, because a lot of the political professionals - a word I use loosely - believe that negative attack ads work. I don't. I believe people would like a good dose of the truth and the facts, because that is what's going to take our nation back. Applying these principles is one way you can separate real leaders from political poseurs, and we desperately need voters who have the ability to do that.