We Need Leaders Who Serve the Nation, Not Their Party

Last week, at the Winter Meeting of the National Governors Association, I witnessed something rare in our time: leaders who seemed less interested in the politics of division and much more interested in solving problems.

What moved me most was the tone, inspired leadership, and quiet discipline of governance I saw among Governors of both parties.

In a season when our national conversation is so coarse it can be crippling, these Governors spoke a different language—the language of results.

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, Chair of the NGA, described himself not as a politician but as a businessman—who, by the way, built a company with $1,000 from a garage into an enterprise spanning 42 states.

Oklahomans, he said, did not send him to office to wage partisan war. They sent him to deliver results. Early in his tenure, he commuted sentences as part of a broader effort at criminal justice reform—hardly a move designed for partisan applause. Now he is leading a charge to fuel entrepreneurship in this 250th year of what began as a startup nation. His emphasis was not ideological. It was practical. And it was deeply American.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore spoke with the clarity of a soldier. As a captain in Afghanistan, he reminded us, he never asked the men and women under his command whether they were Republicans or Democrats. They had a mission. They relied on one another. “Service can save us,” he has said—and in Maryland, he has advanced a Service Year Option to unite young people across differences in common cause. It is difficult to demonize someone with whom you have served.

Bryan Woolston/AP

Utah Governor Spencer Cox quoted our mutual friend and American Enterprise Institute scholar Yuval Levin, who distills our Constitutional challenge to a single question:

How do we act together when we don’t think alike?

Governor Cox, when asked which Governors he most admires, named Democrats and Republicans alike—leaders who govern effectively in their states, those “laboratories of democracy” envisioned by Louis Brandeis. In that spirit, Governors learn from one another not as rivals, but as stewards of a shared experiment.

As I listened, I thought of what we hear from Americans in communities across the country. In research conducted by Hart Research for More Perfect, we asked Americans how they most identify themselves. The top answers were family, being an American, and faith. Political affiliation ranked last—and by a wide margin.

Yet one would never know it from the daily spectacle of our national politics, where the partisan label often precedes the human being.

The new CEO of the NGA, Brandon Tatum, reminded us that the association began in 1908 when President Theodore Roosevelt convened all of the nation’s Governors at the White House to conserve natural resources for future generations. The challenges were real; the divisions were present. But the call was national, not partisan.

The same spirit was clearly evident earlier this year at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. David Holt, Mayor of Oklahoma City and President of the Conference, spoke plainly on national television: Mayors work across politics every day. They must. Navigable streets do not care about party registration. Public safety does not bend to ideology. Mayors solve problems, or they are replaced.

My colleague and dear friend, Timothy Shriver, gives a simple response to the fever of national division: “Enough.” Enough of the politics that divides us for sport. Enough of the rhetoric that wounds for advantage. Enough of mistaking heat for light. Pollster Frank Luntz highlighted the concerns of Americans about the costs of a divided nation: a rise in extremism, national problems going unsolved, and the loss of traditional American values of cooperation and compromise.

In our work at More Perfect and in our initiatives that bring leaders together across all sorts of divisions to tackle public problems, we see steady progress at the local and state levels. History reminds us that when citizen-led innovation proves its worth, national leadership is required to bring it to scale.

At the launch of More Perfect, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin observed that every great transformation in American history first began with citizens—private individuals with no public appointment, but with conviction. They organized. They persisted. And eventually they called upon their government to enshrine their cause in law and policy: conservation and the National Parks, breakthroughs in vaccination, the long march toward civil rights.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we would do well to remember that America itself was a citizen initiative before it was a government — a bold idea advanced by imperfect people determined to act together, even when they did not think alike.

The Governors I heard last week, and the Mayors weeks before them, did not pretend that differences disappear. They demonstrated that differences can be governed.

Leadership is rising across the country—from states and cities, from citizens and communities—where leaders are judged not by the ferocity of their partisanship, but by the fidelity of their service.