Not My President: Has Leadership Changed for Good?

It did not escape notice that many of the most judicious and responsive leaders around the world were women. A similar pattern appeared on our own shores. Amy Acton, M.D., the former director of Ohio’s Department of Health, became a minor celebrity for her early action and clear public addresses; a group of Bay Area leaders—including London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, and Sara Cody, M.D., the public-health director of Santa Clara County—implemented the first shelter-in-place order in the country; and female mayors such as Muriel Bowser, of Washington, D.C.; Keisha Lance Bottoms, of Atlanta; and Lori Lightfoot, of Chicago, rose in prominence as they took on questions of police brutality and funding with apparent candor.

But as the summer began, the season’s true role models remained the hundreds and thousands of peaceful organizers—many of them young, many of color—marching, pushing for change, and raising their voices in video clips broadcast from the streets. The country watched as the 26-year-old Black actor Keke Palmer eloquently and openly pleaded with members of the National Guard to join the protest—“We need you. So march with us”—and helped get them to kneel in solidarity and mourning for injustice. And it watched as Curtis Hayes Jr., a 31-year-old Black man in Charlotte, North Carolina, channeled, in a few perfect lines, a history’s worth of desperation and imparted to a 16-year-old an extraordinary plea for more productive progress. “What you see right now is going to happen 10 years from now—at 26, you’re going to be doing the same thing I’m doing!” he cried. “Y’all come up with a better way, ’cause we ain’t doing it.”

The country also watched as several of the old podium leaders began to step back and allow new voices on the ground to lead. Elizabeth Warren and Mitt Romney—two political actors not often aligned—both showed up to join Black Lives Matter protests in early June, allowing themselves to fall behind the leadership of young Black people pushing for change. And, beginning in the early summer, the alternative to Donald Trump for the presidency—Joe Biden—began to adapt the kind of leadership that he’d exemplified for decades. Before the events of this spring and summer, Biden was the image of an old-school American politician: shaking hands and hugging babies, stumping at crowded rallies, standing tall on the dais and flashing his bright smile for the lens. But the pandemic and the protests seemed to move him to reexamine his standing in the limelight. While President Trump was in front of cable-news cameras, spouting misinformation, Biden lay low. He took time to assemble concrete plans—a daily White House report on testing, a network of emergency hospitals, national real-time tracking of cases—plus measures for economic recovery. Shortly after Memorial Day, when the U.S. death toll of coronavirus reached its grim milestone, he issued an intimate message to all the Americans who had lost loved ones. “I think I know what you’re feeling,” said the former vice president, who lost a wife and a baby daughter in a car accident in 1972 and his son Beau, to brain cancer, in 2015. “You feel like you’re being sucked into a black hole in the middle of your chest. It’s suffocating. Your heart is broken, and there’s nothing but a feeling of emptiness right now.” It was a startlingly direct message, and it sought to suggest that Biden was a leader not for his image but for his everyday experience and his candid speech. When he responded publicly to the early protests, on June 2, he made the theme explicit.

“The country is crying out for leadership,” Biden said. “Leadership that can unite us. Leadership that brings us together. Leadership that can recognize pain and deep grief of communities that have had a knee on their neck for too long.” He went on, “That’s what the presidency is: a duty of care.” That first gesture of that care can be in choosing a running mate. Many are calling for it to be a woman of color, as a way of staying open to the leaders of this time. At the start of this year, a leadership of groundwork and shared stakes across difference seemed to have fallen toward the past. In the fall, it may become the future once again.