lessons in life and leadership from Disney movie Maleficent. http://t.co/hi2RlRpi8i @ThisWeekABC @ABC @Disney
— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) August 25, 2014
"Two kingdoms. ... Only a great hero or a terrible villain might bring them together."
This weekend, I took my daughter to the wonderful Disney movie
"Maleficent," produced by ABC News' parent company, and enjoyed it
thoroughly, but the line above struck me and it made me think about
America today and about leadership. So many of us are looking to have
the word "united" practiced more in the United States in order to
address all our hopes and dreams and needs. But for the last 10 years we
seem to be coming up empty at the box office of politics whenever we
choose our leaders.
Today in America, we have a part of the country that sees President Obama
as a great hero (mostly hardcore Democrats) and part of the country
sees him as a terrible villain (mostly hardcore Republicans). This is
almost a mirror image of how things were when President George W. Bush
held the nation's highest office. Most Democrats despised him and most
Republicans loved him -- again one part saw him as a villain, the other
part viewed him as a hero.
We are a country today torn into separate kingdoms of party, of race, of
sex, and of income levels -- each side without trust of the other, and
each in search of a leader who can take us forward and bind us together
as one. The question becomes: What type of leader can make this to
happen or what events will continue to transpire that can push us in
this direction boldly?
For a time after the terrible events of 9/11, a common awful villain
united our disparate kingdom. Terrorists caused our country to pull
together as one against a common enemy, but this didn't last long
because we still searched for our hero in leadership. President Bush
squandered this opening by using the existing political capital in
divisive, error-prone and partisan ways. And soon, we fell back into two
separate kingdoms separated by partisanship and in many other ways.
When President Obama first was elected to office, the country had great
hope that a new transformational leader the likes of which we had not
seen would bring us together. He, too, had tremendous political capital
at the beginning with high approval ratings and acceptance but, like his
predecessor, he practiced a partisan leadership that drove the country
even further apart. President Obama ran against the villain of
Washington, D.C., and became all of what most voters despise about
federal leadership today.
Each of us contains both hero and villain. We each have a dark side and
we each have a light side. We are each part sinner and part saint. We
hold ideals and values in our hearts and souls, but at times we practice
in the world in a way that seems we are more in tune with our basest
desires. We want to love openly and care widely, but we are filled with
fear and don't want to lose. So we feel divided and in conflict,
thinking we have to choose between hero and villain. But the path to
unity is not denying each side but resolving this paradox internally.
It is incumbent on each of us in our own journeys to embrace this
paradox and realize we are both -- and then, from this resolution, to
begin to lead our own lives in a new way, in a way that accepts our
light and our dark, and know that we each aren't all good or all bad. We
would then be able to see that each other has a similar dynamic, and to
hold our values at our center and move into the flawed world with the
knowledge that we are all on the same path struggling with this paradox.
We must lead in this way before we vest in another president a power of
leadership to help all of us.
Once we can do that, then we will be more open to the types of leaders
who can be successful at uniting our warring kingdoms, a leader in Washington, D.C.,
who embraces our highest and heavenly ideals and who is also versed in
the tactics of succeeding here on this Earth in a practical way, a
leader who is both sinner and saint, who has the heart of an angel, and
who can dance with the devil.
At the conclusion of the movie "Maleficent," all was resolved and the
fighting parties came together. As the narrator said, "In the end, my
kingdom was not united by a hero or a villain as legend predicted, but
by one who was both hero and villain."
We must first do this for ourselves in our own lives, and then look for that in our country's leaders -- hero and villain.
There you have it.
Matthew Dowd is an ABC News analyst and special correspondent.
Opinions expressed in this column do not reflect the views of ABC News.
