George Bush is another example of a man who leads only those who believe in the same things that he believes in; which is not at all what I am talking about when I use the term leadership. Leadership inspires people to work harder, live better lives and be more honest with themselves and their loved ones. Leadership brings people of diverse beliefs together and helps them accomplish things that make the world a better place to live in for everyone. Leadership considers where we are now and looks to the future. Leadership sees the time between now and the future as a means to an end that involves everyone. Real leadership fixes current problems without creating worse ones to be handled by our children. Does that appear to describe the Bush Administration in your experience? If it does than you are one of the people who has signed on for four more years of divisiveness.

Dividing the people into camps that will oppose one another to the death has happened in the past of this nation. It is not often spoken of as one of our more splendid moments except by those who romanticize war. That pitting of the North against the South resulted in our Civil War and cursed our nation with divisions that still haunt us nearly a century and a half later. Could anything have changed that outcome before the war cemented those dividing lines in our national character? Was the war made inevitable by the hardened positions on both sides of the states rights issue that actually caused the war? Would the secession of Texas and a few other rural states from the union have bothered any of us from the North much? Would slavery have ended anyway with the onset of industrialization and the mechanization of farm work? If the Mason Dixon line separated two nations with similar constitutions would we have fought a war by now anyway? No one has the answers to those questions today. Will our descendants be asking the same kind of questions about us a century and a half from now?

Are our differences becoming greater than our similarities in this country once again? Are our current culture wars likely to lead us into the suppression of one camp or the other? If it does could that suppression generate armed resistance and eventually open warfare? Sometimes that seems more likely than any other outcome when I find myself attacked for my political or personal positions in crude and angry language. Threatening words do lead to action some portion of the time in this country. Are we headed toward a division in this nation that can only be resolved by bloodshed and death? I sort of doubt it but I never thought we would try to solve the problems in the Middle East by invading Iraq twenty years ago. If I had picked a nation to invade then it would have been Iran and Iraq would have been on our side. Who can know what the future will bring us except in the broadest sweeping terms?

There are several styles and types of leadership that work to bind people to an individual in the many ways that followers are bound to their leader. Strong images of men doing macho things work well on a lot of people. Clever phrasing in a speech works for others. Shared principles between the person leading and the person following are essential to the equation of leadership that endures beyond a single issue. That is where I suspect that Howard Dean lost momentum. His initial issue was the war and when people examined him in the light of other issues they found that they had more shared principles with John Kerry or John Edwards than Howard Dean. Are any of the Presidential Candidates this time out likely to bring the nation closer together than we are today?

The issues that divide us the most relate to social and religious values and every politician in our nation has positions calculated to take advantage of those divisions. The last time we all felt a part of this nation was on 9/11 2001. If anything since then we have become more firmly divided by our different points of view. One point of view on abortion is that it is a matter of individual conscience on the part of the mother. Another point of view is that the state needs to protect the fetus from its mother's attempts to kill it because it is a separate human being. How can those two be reconciled through the use of reason? It seems clear to me that abortion is only an issue that can be used to divide people along religious lines, not one that can be used to unite them to work toward common economic or social goals for the children at risk. The ultimate irony is when the very same people who decry abortion would deny the same child health care after it is born.

Leadership is about resolving those things that can be resolved. We should all want to work toward a society where young women are not faced with the awful choice of either aborting a fetus or living in poverty as a single mother. Whether or not we get there by suppressing the individual mother's right to make a choice involving her health and well being is then only one issue. Our society may yet be defined by forcing young women to complete their unwanted pregnancies. If it does it will cease to be a society that commands the respect of the disadvantaged women who will be the only ones bound by that law. I have known a vast number of women who lived far different lives than they would have if a mistake in choosing when and with whom to have sex had dictated that future. Will we bind up the father's financial future to the child in the same way as a part of that antiabortion law if it ever passes? I seriously doubt that it can be argued as a point of individual rights that we should not do so. We can clearly identify the father using our current technology. Why should the source of the sperm escape our concern for the unborn?

I think that leading is harder than it ever was in human history. Yet we need good leadership far more in a world where nuclear accidents can destroy huge areas of the earth, to say nothing of the use of nuclear war. We are facing a future where the choice of which nation to invade next is all too poignantly brought home by leaders who are seriously trying to impose that path on all of us. If our choices of leaders are made based on shared principles, then those principles need to be applied everywhere, not just selectively. If our main concern is children then all of the children in the world should be protected. Our concern for children should then dictate our foreign policy and it would be vastly different than it is today. Consistency in principles is one hallmark of great leadership; I do not see that in the policies of the current Administration. We can all only hope that it will enter Washington with the next one. God bless and keep you all safe during our search for principled leaders in a nation too powerful to live without them.