"Mandela has always felt most at ease around children"

Nelson Mandela has always felt most at ease around children, and in some ways his greatest deprivation was that he spent 27 years without hearing a baby cry or holding a child's hand. Last month, when I visited Mandela in Johannesburg — a frailer, foggier Mandela than the one I used to know — his first instinct was to spread his arms to my two boys. Within seconds they were hugging the friendly old man who asked them what sports they liked to play and what they'd had for breakfast. While we talked, he held my son Gabriel, whose complicated middle name is Rolihlahla, Nelson Mandela's real first name. He told Gabriel the story of that name, how in Xhosa it translates as "pulling down the branch of a tree" but that its real meaning is "troublemaker."

- Richard Stengel

Mandela the pragmatist

One of the problems with putting people up on a pedestal is that they become ethereal. From everything I've read about Nelson Mandela, he was a uniquely confident but humble man. One of his most famous quotes is "I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying."

Far from ethereal, according to his biographer Richard Stengel, Mandela was grounded in the long view while being a master tactician and pragmatist. Here are some excerpts from Stengel's identification of Mandela's 8 lessons of leadership:

Mandela is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint, but he would be the first to admit that he is something far more pedestrian: a politician. He overthrew apartheid and created a nonracial democratic South Africa by knowing precisely when and how to transition between his roles as warrior, martyr, diplomat and statesman. Uncomfortable with abstract philosophical concepts, he would often say to me that an issue "was not a question of principle; it was a question of tactics." He is a master tactician...

His unwavering principle — the overthrow of apartheid and the achievement of one man, one vote — was immutable, but almost anything that helped him get to that goal he regarded as a tactic. He is the most pragmatic of idealists.

"He's a historical man," says Ramaphosa. "He was thinking way ahead of us. He has posterity in mind: How will they view what we've done?" Prison gave him the ability to take the long view. It had to; there was no other view possible. He was thinking in terms of not days and weeks but decades. He knew history was on his side, that the result was inevitable; it was just a question of how soon and how it would be achieved. "Things will be better in the long run," he sometimes said. He always played for the long run...

Mandela loved to reminisce about his boyhood and his lazy afternoons herding cattle. "You know," he would say, "you can only lead them from behind." He would then raise his eyebrows to make sure I got the analogy.

As a boy, Mandela was greatly influenced by Jongintaba, the tribal king who raised him. When Jongintaba had meetings of his court, the men gathered in a circle, and only after all had spoken did the king begin to speak. The chief's job, Mandela said, was not to tell people what to do but to form a consensus. "Don't enter the debate too early," he used to say...

Mandela was a lawyer, and in prison he helped the warders with their legal problems. They were far less educated and worldly than he, and it was extraordinary to them that a black man was willing and able to help them. These were "the most ruthless and brutal of the apartheid regime's characters," says Allister Sparks, the great South African historian, and he "realized that even the worst and crudest could be negotiated with."...

Mandela believed that embracing his rivals was a way of controlling them: they were more dangerous on their own than within his circle of influence. He cherished loyalty, but he was never obsessed by it. After all, he used to say, "people act in their own interest." It was simply a fact of human nature, not a flaw or a defect. The flip side of being an optimist — and he is one — is trusting people too much. But Mandela recognized that the way to deal with those he didn't trust was to neutralize them with charm...

Mandela is comfortable with contradiction. As a politician, he was a pragmatist who saw the world as infinitely nuanced...Every problem has many causes. While he was indisputably and clearly against apartheid, the causes of apartheid were complex. They were historical, sociological and psychological. Mandela's calculus was always, What is the end that I seek, and what is the most practical way to get there?...

Knowing how to abandon a failed idea, task or relationship is often the most difficult kind of decision a leader has to make. In many ways, Mandela's greatest legacy as President of South Africa is the way he chose to leave it. When he was elected in 1994, Mandela probably could have pressed to be President for life — and there were many who felt that in return for his years in prison, that was the least South Africa could do..."His job was to set the course," says Ramaphosa, "not to steer the ship." He knows that leaders lead as much by what they choose not to do as what they do.

While looking for images to go with this post, I was struck by the power of Nelson Mandela's smile. It reaches out and grabs you and is there in his eyes even when not present on his lips.

I believe that Mandela was a truly joyful man. But according to Stengel, that smile had a pragmatic role to play as well.

When Mandela was running for the presidency in 1994, he knew that symbols mattered as much as substance. He was never a great public speaker, and people often tuned out what he was saying after the first few minutes. But it was the iconography that people understood. When he was on a platform, he would always do the toyi-toyi, the township dance that was an emblem of the struggle. But more important was that dazzling, beatific, all-inclusive smile. For white South Africans, the smile symbolized Mandela's lack of bitterness and suggested that he was sympathetic to them. To black voters, it said, I am the happy warrior, and we will triumph. The ubiquitous ANC election poster was simply his smiling face. "The smile," says Ramaphosa, "was the message."

So while we venerate Nelson Mandela, let us not forget that he was a man who was grounded in what it took to engage in the struggle and win. Those are lessons in life and leadership we can all emulate.

Racism in the Obama era

I'm a day late to this one, but I wanted to make sure to note that yesterday Jonathan Chait wrote one of the most important articles I've read on racism in the Obama era. If you haven't already, please go read the whole thing right now.

In reference to the movie 12 Years a Slave, Chait makes this observation:

Notably, the most horrific torture depicted in 12 Years a Slave is set in motion when the protagonist, Solomon Northup, offers up to his master engineering knowledge he acquired as a free man, thereby showing up his enraged white overseer. It was precisely Northup’s calm, dignified competence in the scene that so enraged his oppressor. The social system embedded within slavery as depicted in the film is one that survived long past the Emancipation Proclamation – the one that resulted in the murder of Emmett Till a century after Northup published his autobiography. It’s a system in which the most unforgivable crime was for an African-American to presume himself an equal to — or, heaven forbid, better than — a white person.

For a while now I've been agreeing with Rev. Dr. William Barber that we are in the midst of the Third Reconstruction. In the first we ended slavery and in the second we ended legal discrimination (ie, Jim Crow). Both of those involved white people essentially giving civil rights to black people.

The situation Chait is describing involves a whole different kind of challenge. With the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, white people are having to deal with a black man as not only our equal, but our leader. Too many of us are prepared for neither. While most white people would not support slavery or legal discrimination, we're not really ready to look black people in the eye as equals, much less see them in positions of authority over us. That is what centuries of programming has done to our collective consciousness...we assume deference.

It might make you uncomfortable to hear me talk about a collective "we" when I describe this form of racism. After all, its much easier to assume that its "those other people" who exhibit it. The truth is that I'm not here to judge anyone. All I know is that when it comes to my journey, I've been working on rooting out this assumption of deference in my brain's hard-wiring for at least a decade now and still find vestiges of it popping up occasionally.

I also am aware that one of the things that has disrupted that hard-wiring more than anything else is the experience of admiring the particular black man (and woman) who reside in the White House right now. Being witness to their daily exercise of intelligence, grace, compassion, and courage has helped establish new norms that challenge all the messages I received consciously and unconsciously over the years.

So this is what is happening to racism in the Obama era. It is tremendously healing for someone like me. But there are far too many people that fear this journey and therefore literally cannot see what is in front of their eyes. Their reaction is to degrade and dismiss what they're seeing in order to maintain the hard-wiring they've become accustomed to. The backlash is ferocious.  For now I'll just say that's their loss.

Immigration Reform Babeeeee!!!!

Its true that President Obama has a lot on his second-term plate right now. But other than getting a budget deal done, the next thing on the checklist is immigration reform. We're not hearing all that much about this topic lately since the right wing is completely focused on Obamacare and the left wing (except for the real activists) is totally caught up in things like whether or not Elizabeth Warren is going to run in 2016. But getting something done on this issue is not only important for the 11 million undocumented workers in this country right now, it is a real test for how our political challenges will be affected by this country's changing demographics. In other words, the Republicans can't afford to lose this one and hope to survive as a party.

There are some signs that Speaker Boehner is aware of all this and might have a plan in mind. First of all, he recently hired Becky Tallent as his immigration policy director.

Boehner’s decision to bring Tallent on as a top aide is as encouraging to supporters of reform as it is disappointing to opponents. Mark Krikorian of the hardline Center for Immigration Studies derided Tallent as “McCain’s amnesty captain” on Twitter and warned Boehner was signalling his intention to push for reform.

But you have to travel the back alleys of wingnutistan in order to get some ideas about what he has in mind. Both Red State and Breibart are reporting that Boehner plans to wait until after filing deadlines have passed for primary challengers to incumbent House members to make a move on immigration reform. They are basing this on what Boehner has supposedly told people behind closed doors.

...in recent weeks, various Texas business interests have told Quorum Report that Boehner has been telling them that he will start holding immigration votes not long after the filing deadline has passed.

Who knows whether this is true or not? But it does make some political sense and so I think its possible. We've known for a while now that the votes are there in the House to pass immigration reform and the only thing holding it up was Boehner. Perhaps the Speaker is smart enough to figure out that he doesn't want to go into the 2014 midterms facing a strong Latino backlash due to his failure to move on this issue.

If so, we'll be chalking up yet another MAJOR accomplishment to President Obama's list of reforms. As he said to the Fast for Families folks..."it is not a question of whether immigration reform will pass, but how soon." Your call, Speaker Boehner.

Barack Obama: A fusion of grace and ambition

I was just following a bunch of links from the days Barack Obama first appeared on the scene and came across this article by David Ignatius from May 2008. Some things are just as true now as they were back then. Enjoy!

Obama has a transcendent ambition: It's part of what gives him the "man of destiny" quality. When you see him on TV or in pictures, he always seems to be looking into the middle distance -- not to any person in particular but toward "the people" and the far horizon.

One way to measure Obama's sense of destiny is to think about the choices before him when he graduated from Harvard Law School as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review: He could have walked into a Supreme Court clerkship or harvested a fortune working for a fancy law firm. But Obama's ambition was much bigger. He went to Chicago to start building a base to run for . . . well, we know where this story leads.

People who met Obama in those early days in Chicago say they were struck by two qualities: First was his remarkable ability to work across racial lines; the second was his political ambition. His strategy was to straddle -- between black and white, between rich and poor, between Harvard and the streets. That's still the essence of his appeal: I am the person who can bring America together because I contain within myself all of its contradictions...

What's compelling about Obama is that fusion of grace and ambition. He's playing for the highest stakes, but he makes it look easy...

Albert Murray titled a collection of his essays on black culture "The Omni-Americans." That was his view of the African American experience, that it pointed in every direction at once -- toward anger and healing, toward rage at America and a patriotism that has led blacks to serve in disproportionate numbers in the military, toward the paradox of hating America and being intensely loyal to it.

That's the history-changing package that Barack Obama brings to the presidential race. Based on last week's primary results, we have a rendezvous in November with that vision of "Omni-America" and the transcendent and potentially disruptive change it represents.

Who knows President Obama?

I'm always fascinated by people who think they know what is going on not only inside the White House, but inside President Obama's head. Unless they've spent a lot of time observing and/or interacting directly, chances are that their pontifications say more about themselves than the actual occupants of the West Wing. Case in point...Ron Fournier.

For all his strengths, Obama is a private, almost cloistered, politician surrounded by fawning aides who don't understand why anybody would object to his policies; thus they are often caught flat-footed by critics. They often put political tactics ahead of governing, protecting the president's image with narrow-minded zeal.

Obama himself has no patience for the nitty-gritty of politics and governance, which means he's both loath to build bipartisan relationships outside the White House and unlikely to directly manage a project, even one as important as Obamacare.

Its telling that the accounts from people who have actually observed President Obama or worked with him directly paint a very different picture. Take for instance the description of the President's decision-making process regarding Libya as told by observer Michael Lewis.

The idea was that the people in the meeting would debate the merits of each [a no-fly zone over Libya or do nothing], but Obama surprised the room by rejecting the premise of the meeting. “He instantly went off the road map,” recalls one eyewitness. “He asked, ‘Would a no-fly zone do anything to stop the scenario we just heard?’” After it became clear that it would not, Obama said, “I want to hear from some of the other folks in the room.”

Obama then proceeded to call on every single person for his views, including the most junior people. “What was a little unusual,” Obama admits, “is that I went to people who were not at the table. Because I am trying to get an argument that is not being made.”... His desire to hear the case raises the obvious question: Why didn’t he just make it himself? “It’s the Heisenberg principle,” he says. “Me asking the question changes the answer. And it also protects my decision-­making.” But it’s more than that. His desire to hear out junior people is a warm personality trait as much as a cool tactic, of a piece with his desire to play golf with White House cooks rather than with C.E.O.’s and basketball with people who treat him as just another player on the court; to stay home and read a book rather than go to a Washington cocktail party; and to seek out, in any crowd, not the beautiful people but the old people. The man has his stat­us needs, but they are unusual. And he has a tendency, an unthinking first step, to subvert established stat­us structures. After all, he became president.

Either you have to assume that Fournier and Lewis are talking about two completely different people, or one knows what he's talking about and the other doesn't have a clue. I know that I'll go with the actual observer over the one who is playing out some convoluted game of projection to satisfy his own ego.

Another fantastic appointment by President Obama

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about President Obama's Race Report Card. In reviewing the list of accomplishments, its impossible to miss the fact that most of them have come from the President's appointments of Eric Holder as Attorney General and Thomas Perez as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Now that Perez is Secretary of Labor, the latter position is open. And it looks like President Obama has chosen another winner...Debo Adegbile.

I was happy to see that my friend Denise Oliver Perez showcased Mr. Adegbile (and the backlash he's getting from the nativists) today.  Here's a little about his background from the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights.

Debo Adegbile is one of the preeminent civil rights litigators of his generation and a bipartisan consensus builder. His experience as the two-time defender of the Voting Rights Act in the Supreme Court puts him in a class of his own when it comes to understanding the application and enforcement of complex civil rights issues. Add that to his stellar career over ten years at the nation’s leading civil rights law firm—the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund—as well as his work in the Senate and in the private sector, and it becomes clear that Adegbile’s skill set, talents, and experience make him the perfect choice to head the Civil Rights Division.

Adegbile’s life mirrors that of the American Dream. A son of immigrants from Ireland and Nigeria, Adegbile grew up in poverty with periods of homelessness to work his way through law school and one day defend American democracy in the Supreme Court.

Millions of Americans rely on the Civil Rights Division to enforce housing, education, and employment discrimination laws, hate crime laws, the Violence Against Women Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the core civil rights statutes that allow all of us to take part in the fullness of American life. Debo Adegbile is the right nominee to head the Civil Rights Division. We call on the Senate to swiftly confirm him.

As I have often said, we tend to focus on legislative action when evaluating presidential accomplishments. But the primary job of POTUS is to administer the federal government. Nowhere is this more important than in the preservation and advancement of civil rights in this country.

Mr. Adegbile will have some big shoes to fill following the stellar work of Thomas Perez. But based on what I've read about him, he's up to the task. Keep your eye on this young man. And thank you President Obama for another fantastic appointment!