Thus you've clearly entered politics at great personal cost, forcing you to repress many key aspects of your personality in order to "do good" by holding public office. This has created two basic political problems:

1) An inauthentic politics which culminated in your un-credible emergence as a lunch-bucket Democrat at the convention after a lifetime as a centrist identified with global issues. The high-minded politics in "Earth in the Balance" is simply incompatible with the mindset of Democratic mercenaries like Carter Eskew, Tony Podesta or Tony Coelho, to whom you opportunistically turned for your political campaigns; and

2) a wooden, unfeeling, artificial, insincere, cloying public personality. You are clearly cut off from your real feelings in public. Perhaps the most poignant and revealing moment in this campaign was when you acknowledged to Matt Lauer that you realized you had a stiff personality in public, but did not believe that you could change it.

It also seems quite clear that a second major psychological handicap that cost you this election is your failure to break free from internalized parental voices which tell you you are not good enough and must constantly prove yourself. This trait, too, distances you from people, who feel you are lecturing them or trying to prove how much you know rather than relate to them on an emotional basis.

My few meetings with you, and reports from trusted friends who know you far better, indicate that you are a well-meaning and decent guy. Your public exaggerations and artificiality are evidence of your divided nature and deep insecurity, not something evil or dangerous.

I remember a Senate hearing in which you spent most of your time showing how much you knew about HDTV rather than asking a question of the witness. It seemed obvious that you were deeply insecure and felt a need to show how smart you were. I can't think of a better explanation for the many personal exaggerations since -- overstating your role in the creation of the Internet, you and Tipper serving as a model for "Love Story," etc. -- that have so bedeviled your campaign.

What would it mean to truly become "your own man," in fact as well as rhetoric, during the next four years? Only you can fully answer this question, of course. But two obvious tasks are immediately apparent.

First, you would seek to build a political and organizational vehicle that is consistent with the deep beliefs that you articulated in your book. This would not mean ignoring issues like taxes, Social Security or Medicare, which need attention. But it would mean elevating issues like global warming, biodiversity loss and aquifer depletion.

You would turn to pollsters like Stanley Greenberg not only to learn how to appeal to the "working middle class" on pocketbook issues, but to figure out how to communicate your deeply held environmental beliefs to them. You would learn how to make your theme not merely "I will fight for you on prescription drugs", but "I will fight for you so that you can leave a legacy to your children and grandchildren of clean industries generating millions of new jobs, and breathable air, drinkable water and clean and affordable energy."

Second, and even more importantly, you would challenge yourself to rise above your defeatism about changing your wooden public personality. Creating a vehicle whose central organizing principle is the environment is a crucial first step, so that you could be regularly speaking out on the issues you truly care about. But more would be needed. You would need to embark on a long, dark night of the soul and confront the psychological issues that cost you this election.

Key would be seeing your entry into private life for the first time in 24 years as an opportunity to pursue personal transformation in a way that is simply not possible for those who hold public office. The key issues are time and psychological space. It takes time politicians don't have to look back on one's previous life, conduct a spiritual and psychological stock-taking, separate what one truly wants from internalized parental voices pushing us to be what we are not. And it takes a distance from the arena to sweat through surfacing repressed painful feelings of inadequacy or vulnerability so as to become an integrated human being who displays genuine feeling in public as well as in private.

It is a tragedy that therapy with a psychologist who knows how to challenge internal defenses is probably not available to you if you wish to run for public office in 2004. There is nothing sadder about our public life than the fact that the public officials and media personalities who most need therapy for their narcissism, inauthenticity and lack of genuine feeling are the least likely to pursue it. It is not only that it can cost a politician votes. Undertaking therapy makes one vulnerable, the very feeling that most of the "Type A" personalities in public life are most on the run from.

But there are many other paths -- including deep personal reflection, contemplation, discussions, reading, video tapes, self-education courses, meditative immersion in nature -- that can help you become who you truly are, in public as well as in private.

There are many reasons to hope you will give all this a try, but no one has put the case for conceding and returning to fight another day better than yourself. Earth is truly in the balance if America cannot generate leaders who not only understand the global environmental crisis, but have the courage and skill to build a public support to save it. Clearly you understand it; summoning the courage to organize your political life around it is what you'll need to be an effective president, and person.

Recent Stories