Having studied leadership across sectors for nearly a half century, I’ve found that power sharing at the top is often harder than delegation and execution down the hierarchy of command. Leadership partnerships across sectors that work well have a secret recipe—which Kamala Harris seemed to understand but which Donald Trump seems to have missed, given their recent selections of running mate.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden were primary rivals who became friends as President and Vice President, with affection and mutual support. By contrast, historian Stephen Ambrose documented how much Dwight Eisenhower as President disliked and distrusted his vice president Richard Nixon, forging a genuine post-election mentor/protégé relationship with Nixon’s rival JFK. FDR had little interest in Vice Presidents, churning through three of them in office, with one, John Nance Garner, concluding, “The Vice Presidency is not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Perhaps most horrifyingly, in the final days of his presidency, Donald Trump reportedly approved of the mob of Jan. 6 rioters threatening to lynch his loyal Vice President Mike Pence, saying to his chief of staff Mark Meadows and a deputy Cassidy Hutchinson that Pence deserved to be hanged, as Trump complained that Pence was whisked off to safety.
Trump again recently distanced himself from his new partner, J.D. Vance, when questioned about Vance’s troubling positions attacking corporate America, his disinterest in aid to Ukraine as well as Vance’s offensive statements viewed as misogynist. As Vance was identified as the most unpopular Vice President candidate in modern history, a choice condemned even by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, Trump declined to defend his partner’s preparedness to lead, claiming that the Vice President does not matter.
By contrast, the surprise reports of Harris’s weekend VP candidate interviews were that Walz’s warmth, authenticity, competence separated him from the pool of candidates. Sure, he has a homespun sense of humor, branding effectively the GOP/MAGA candidates as “weird” so effectively that it went truly viral. His partisan anchor is actually the Democratic Farmer Labor Party of Minnesota, the party of folk singer Woody Guthrie and former Vice President Humbert Humphrey (known as “the happy warrior”) as well as the anchor of the original grass roots “progressive” movement of the 1920s. Walz, as a father, a high school teacher for 15 years, a winning football coach and LBGTQ club faculty sponsor, a military veteran, a five-term Democratic Congressman in an historically Republican district, and a hugely popular, competent, two-term Governor certainly offered reassuring credentials to voters. However, it was character and chemistry which seemed to “trump” such credentials given the strong resumes of his rivals.
As CNN’s Jamie Gangel reported on Sunday, “There were a lot of details on Minnesota’s Governor Walz meeting with VP Harris’s vetting team before the Kamala Harris meeting. I am told that they loved him—he was authentic, a team player, and while he’s not from a battleground state, he’s born and bred in Nebraska, a natural, who will appeal to independents, swing voters across the Midwest—a happy warrior.”
Political scientist Richard Neustadt in his classic 1960 work Presidential Power advised that character is the most important quality in selecting a president to lead this nation. Similarly, presidential historian James David Barbour advised that a happy person with strong-self esteem and a positive disposition make for the most effective leaders.
While Democrat Jimmy Carter told me several times that he never used the term “malaise” to describe a dark time during his presidency, his July 1979 downbeat national address was labeled the “malaise speech” as he talked about American failure and a crisis of confidence. Not surprisingly, Carter lost in a landslide to the more upbeat, positive imagery of Republican Ronald Reagan “Morning of America.” Harris seems to share that positive aura with Walz but also a chemistry of collaboration. Egos must exit with understanding supplanting grandstanding.
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