Courageous Kaepernick vs. Cowardly White House: Exceptional Leadership 101
By: Emily Swan
Tags: Government, Politics, Sports, Leadership, Life

Leadership consists of three things: calling people to an ideal — noble or otherwise, counting the cost, and managing the consequences. Exceptional leadership demands courageous sacrifice and surfaces human traits that become legendary stories. Cowardly leadership dies with the wind.

Two things happened yesterday that provide a contrast between good leadership and poor leadership. First, the Nike ad with Colin Kaepernick released nationwide; second, an anonymous White House staffer wrote an op-ed in the The New York Times claiming that “many of the senior officials in [Trump’s] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Kaepernick calls America to be a better version of itself. If we are the land of the free, then we are free to protest what we feel are unjust systems. We are free to critique those in power. We are free to ask law enforcement, who do in fact shoot more unarmed black people than white people, to deal with with their inherent biases, better train their personnel, and apologize for breaking public trust. When white Americans critique a black man exercising his first amendment right and punish him by denying him work, and when the white majority of police officers call for a boycott of Nike because of Kaepernick’s new gig with them (and yes, it is the white majorty police force — the National Black Police Association wrote a letter in support of Nike and Kaepernick, saying they were not consulted about the boycott), it reminds us how we so often uphold an America where minorities are punished for asking to be treated with dignity.

Kaepernick watched the tide swell against his anthem kneeling, and continued his protest in spite of the pushback, knowing full well the scapegoating mob conspired to be rid of him. He kneeled anyway, and he paid the price for his ideals. I will follow a noble idealist any day of the week.

On the other hand, we have a cowardly White House staffer begging Americans to believe, not in the thoroughly American form of checks-and-balances (which requires a functioning executive branch), but in them.

David Frum writes this morning in The Atlantic:

Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees — now that’s a constitutional crisis. If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution — and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.

Whoever wrote the op-ed in the New York times isn’t calling Americans to a noble ideal. They, in fact, call us dispose of our noble ideals and place our trust a group of people who are openly defiant, manipulative, and downright arrogant. By writing this op-ed, the author seems to believe s/he will be painted as a hero in the end, but all I see is a coward — someone unwilling to embrace constitutional checks and balances, someone unwilling to ask Americans to believe we are better than our current mess of a government shows us to be, someone unwilling to name themselves for fear of it costing them their job and reputation, and someone unwilling to call others to join them in a mass display of integrity. Because this person lacks integrity. The very thing they accuse the president of lacking — morality, “discernible first principles that guide his decision making” — is found wanting in them as well. Or, if there is a first principle to be found, it is “In me I trust, and you should too.”

If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s this: Lead like Kaepernick, with your whole heart, trusting there’s a higher principle of love and justice calling us all to be better. Don’t lead like the brood of vipers in the White House, who trust only in themselves.