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Just two words of advice to the new president, but what a banquet of wisdom they serve: Emulate Eisenhower.
Dwight D. Eisenhower's greatness can be measured, in part, by the fact that today he is regarded as the boring president of a boring decade. In fact, those times were scarier than ours. Ike had to deal with full-fledged crises in the Taiwan Strait (where Communist China attacked Taiwanese forces), Eastern Europe (where Soviet tanks rolled over a rebellious Hungary), and the Middle East (where Suez boiled over). So tense was the atmosphere that security experts both outside and inside the administration urged pre-emptive nuclear strikes on China, pleas which Eisenhower, to his credit, rejected.
Meanwhile, he had to close out a stalemated war, bring West Germany into a fledgling NATO, and cope with the rise of the Warsaw Pact. Today's fear of terrorism is trifling compared to what the country experienced in the late 1950s, when the Soviets' development of intercontinental ballistic missiles exposed the U.S. homeland to the threat not just of suitcase nukes but of annihilation.
And Eisenhower made it all look boring. Such was the peace, prosperity, and stability he left behind.
He did it by projecting calm and playing golf, by eschewing dramatic gestures and grandiose reforms, and by governing resolutely from the center. Where the inexperienced George W. Bush came to office determined not to waste a day on anything less than game-changing reform, Eisenhower, a subtle realist, understood that a president can more easily do harm than good, that a strong president nurtures rather than fractures consensus, and that power has its own natural hydraulics, which not even a president can defy.
As Gil Troy shows in Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents (a book every President-elect should read), moderation is not just about splitting the difference between extremes; it is a coherent governing strategy all its own, and one that has consistently succeeded better than the flashier alternatives. For all its exhausting eventfulness, Bush's hyperactive administration has solved few if any of the major problems it inherited. The next president needs to reverse the ratio, destabilizing less while solving more. Like Ike.
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