WHAT WE'VE GOT HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

Critics decry today's lack of leaders and leadership. Especially from Washington. And while this is an easy and historically common complaint, it almost always comes from those who have never held a position of leadership. Like the beer-aroused fans in the bleachers snorting their advice on how to play the game.

Leadership -- either innate or rehearsed -- pretty much comes down to this: The ability to communicate some great ideas to a great many people to achieve some great goals. The operative word is "communicate." And it all starts with getting the people's attention.

In the 18th and 19th C, our political voices had a fairly clear shot at the public.There were just a few newspapers in the larger cities, only one in the smaller towns, and of course no radio-TV-Internet. So when Washington gave his Farewell Address and Lincoln his Gettysburg Address, their words didn't have instant-pundit analysis...a response-by-the-opposition...and a hundred gazillion blogs slicing and dicing each paragraph. Even in the 20th C, when FDR broadcast one of his Fireside Chats, virtually the entire adult population gathered around their radios. Not only to listen, but to believe.

Here in the 21st C, virtually no one believes! Anything, anytime, anywhere!

There's an exquisitely ironic pearl sealed inside this enormous national oyster. It's this. The very instruments of today's enhanced communication and leadership have somehow begun to confuse not clarify the messages. Pick a word -- over-load, glut, static -- any word will do. Or as the gang-chain boss in COOL HAND LUKE classically put it: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate..."

Democracy means many good things. Among them is its diversity. The ability of its diverse publics to be heard in the marketplace of ideas. But picture today's marketplace less like Plato's ancient Lyceum, and more like a Middle Eastern Bazaar. Less a thoughtful clash among enlightened thinkers, more a brawling competition of hawking pitchmen.

When "American Idol," "Oprah," and "The Housewives of New Jersey" can arouse bigger audiences than presidents, democracy has itself a challenge the Constitution never quite anticipated. When any small angry mind can shout "you lie" from a Congressional audience or get a million instant "hits" to their undocumented conspiracy rant or fill the Washington Mall with their pitch to our darker side, democracy's greatest promise has just bumped into a whole new breed of abductors.

Democracy -- compared to thousands of years of pharaohs, emperors, and kings -- is the new kid on the block. To prevail, it'll have to work harder to make sure its diversity doesn't spell its demise...