If that teamwork fails, the challenges will multiply and opportunities will evaporate. Real leadership takes risks. Polling and focus groups and rapid communications keep our public officials more in touch with public opinion than ever before. Indeed, we are often so closely in touch that we are buffeted by swings in the public mood. And, without leadership to point out the contradictions, the result is the sort of disconnect between desires and sacrifices that has led to our budget problems.
Real leadership is informed by the public mood, but it does more than just follow the polls.
Real leadership offers ideas, defends them and refines them when better ideas come along. It tries thoughtfully to understand and make sense of the dramatic changes in. Real leadership, in short, seeks to bring coherence to the perpetual chaos of democracy. Citizenship itself is an indispensable form of leadership. The strength of education, as I said earlier, rises or falls on the leadership and commitment of communities and local people.