KARL ROVE ON THE PRESIDENCY

Mr. Rove delivered a lecture entitled "What makes a great President" on Nov. 13, 2002, at the University of Utah. Here are some excerpts:

But it strikes me that one of the most important things that a president has to have to be successful is clarity of vision. Effective presidents have a strategic vision and a direction in which they want to lead the country. They are concerned with big issues and big challenges, and seek to explain their vision in a way that allows people to understand their circumstances and develop confidence in those proposals.

For the clarity of vision doesn’t necessarily always lend itself to a clarity of direction, which is the second great characteristic – consistency of purpose but a willingness to change strategy in moments of crisis.

The third thing, and this is what I have come to understand acutely in the last two years, is that in moments of crisis presidents benefit, for good or for ill, from the legacies that have been left to them by the previous presidents.

What Truman did in changing the national security structure of the United States made it possible for America to win the Cold War and develop the military strength necessary to keep the peace.

A successful president must have an internal self-confidence. A good president doesn’t wet his finger in the morning and put it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing, but has core values and confidence in self.

Successful presidents are also successful coalition builders. No president can operate effectively by himself. A president must build coalitions within his own party and between the parties. He must also rise above parties. That’s not to say to triangulate against both parties, but at times, to put the interests of the country above the partisan interests of either party.

A successful president also organizes advisers to give him what a president most often lacks – solid, straightforward advice.

A president who is successful, I am convinced, is a president who spends a lot of time figuring out how to cultivate this truth-telling, because you can get very isolated inside that bubble. Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue is 18 acres of sheer utopia, and like Utopia it can be isolated from reality quickly.