So I was surprised that I had missed his article in Rolling Stone back in 2000 when he followed the McCain campaign around for a week. He spends the last section of the article about leadership, which he defines as:
A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with "inspire" being used here in a serious and non-cliché way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own.He then makes the point that we are less susceptible to real leadership today, as compared to JFK's presidency:
True, JFK's audience was more "innocent" than we are: Vietnam hadn't happened yet, or Watergate, or the Savings and Loan scandal, etc. But there's also something else. The science of sales and marketing was still in its drooling infancy in 1961 when Kennedy was saying "Ask not..." The young people he inspired had not been skillfully marketed to all their lives. They knew nothing of Spin. They were not totally, terribly familiar with salesmen.. . .
But if you're subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough — like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let's say — it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn't give a [I'll edit this, it is a Mormon blog, so use your imagination] about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself.
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