Why do today’s leaders seem so … small?

[unhappycamper]

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/01/21/why-do-todays-leaders-seem-so-small/



West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famous Warschauer Kniefall — “Warsaw Genuflection” — on December 7, 1970.

Why do today’s leaders seem so … small?
By Robin Sears | Jan 21, 2014 8:59 pm

Anniversaries of events surrounding great leaders always provoke unkind comparisons with the performances and personas of their successors. The mists of time erase their weaknesses and bathe their achievements in the nostalgic, golden glow of memory.

The 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination evoked such a mood. It was especially strong as his tragic fall is usually rolled together with the equally painful deaths of his brother, Robert, and of Martin Luther King Jr. only a few years later. All three men left behind the ache of missed opportunity.

We choose to forget that Kennedy got not a single historic piece of legislation passed, waffled on both Cuba and Vietnam and, perhaps like Barack Obama, was somewhat better at moving audiences than at driving government. Robert Caro’s magisterial, soon-to-be five-volume audit of Lyndon Johnson’s life has forced those of us old enough to remember hating him for the war in Vietnam to step back and reconsider his accomplishments.

Assessments of leadership are rarely set in stone. History’s judgments force painful edits of the reputations of the mighty and the maligned. The lens of one’s own experience affects one’s vision of greatness. For the Polish, Winston Churchill’s acquiescence to the murder of tens of thousands of their countrymen by quiet agreement with Josef Stalin at Yalta will forever mute the colours of his reputation. Canadians and Australians who know of Churchill’s role in decreeing the appalling and meaningless sacrifice of their young men — at Gallipoli in the First World War and in Hong Kong during the Second World War — will never see him as grateful Englishmen always will.

[bemildred]

1. Because they are.

Most of them these days are cowardly self-serving mediocrities. Little enterpreneurs.

[Doctor_J]

2. Because they're just puppets and figureheads

Last edited Thu Jan 23, 2014, 11:42 AM - Edit history (1)

basically interchangeable lackeys of the Kochs and Waltons. In 2009-2010 we had the WH and huge majorities in the Congress, and still acquiesced to the tiny minority of teabaggers. How can Reid and Pelosi and Obama not be considered small with that in mind?

Edit: Then there's Obama's predecessor, who's also mean, dumb, and has never earned an honest dime in his entire life, yet somehow achieves "leader of the free world" status.