The global leadership crisis

If anyone can step up to this challenge, it's Obama, but it's obvious that changes need to be made. Is this a matter of Americans embracing Obama and his plan or will Obama need to make changes? More from David Rothkopf of the Carnegie Endowment:

Here in the United States, there is Barack Obama. At a time of great crisis, there are invested in him -- as they were in Roosevelt -- the hopes of a nation and of the world. He has embraced the example of Lincoln, surrounding himself with powerful, independent-minded advisers. But as we watched his news conference last week, and as we listen to Geithner's testimonies and see the administration's economic team in action, we have to wonder: Will they emerge as the leaders we need, with new ideas, courageous enough to shape new institutions? The record so far is mixed.

Obama has made missteps in his first two months, and we can only guess whether they are due to his learning curve or his predisposition. The president's economic team is so uniformly drawn from one time and place -- Bob Rubin's farm team -- that they look like a poster child for the early warning symptoms of groupthink. Geithner & Co. have floundered in breaking free of the ideas that dominated in the 1990s, but they have also been bold about reintroducing government's role where it must be greater. Thus far, there is as much to worry us as there is to comfort us. Soon, we will have to judge this crew and, if they fall short, demand change yet again.

But to paraphrase Roosevelt, Obama can only be as great a president as the people let him be. If citizens had turned on Roosevelt early, he would have faltered, along with the nation's recovery. Because what is often lost in such discussions is the idea that leadership implies collaboration. We get the leaders we demand and thus deserve. (As the United States and England were making Roosevelt and Churchill, Germany and Italy were making Hitler and Mussolini.)

I might take exception with Churchill in this context. It was only after every other "standard" approach and political team had tried and failed that the Brits ushered in Churchill. Churchill was considered a political outsider and considered a last resort when we became PM in 1940.