Worth a gander

Joe Klein isn't one of my favorites and he's a hopeless liberal hack, but I thought this piece on leadership, politics and the preseidency was worth posting. Here's the gist:

"We're going to meet the voters where they are," Shrum had told me early in the Kerry campaign, which sounded innocent enough—but what he really meant was, We're going to follow our polling numbers and focus groups. We're going to emphasize the things that voters think are important. In fact, Shrum had it completely wrong. Presidential campaigns are not about "meeting the voters where they are." They are about leadership and character. Mark Mellman, Kerry's lead pollster, figured that out too late. "If you asked people what they were most interested in, they would say jobs, education and health care," he later said. "But they thought the President should be interested in national security."