What kind of person makes the best president? Or at least is the kind of president voters tend to prefer? Someone who is pretty good at a lot of things, or has one big idea? The idea stems from a popular essay written by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin who argued that writers and thinkers could be divided into two categories: "hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust) and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson)."
Andrew Sullivan points to a couple of articles that apply this thought to the presidential race (here is an application of it to political pundits). Liel Leibovitz argues that "What we want is a decently intelligent president with one solid idea. Or, to borrow Isaiah Berlin’s well-known distinction, what we want is not a fox but a hedgehog." She suggests that Rick Santorum comes closest to being this type of candidate (Obama and Romney are both foxes in her opinion).
"In word and deed, he is largely committed to the idea that most Americans live in communities, that they’ve seen these communities battered badly by deregulation, global trade, and the other angry angels of the free market, and that no policy or political statement matters unless it’s directly geared toward restoring a sense of mutual responsibility and collective well-being."
She offers the following intruguing thought: "Foxes are rational animals, and they often offer good solutions to all sorts of problems. But voters aren’t rational animals, which is why they often fail to see or support these solutions. This is why someone like Santorum resonates much better than someone like Mitt Romney: Beyond his wealth and his android-like lack of social grace, Romney is a fox through and through, a politician who takes pride in attacking issues individually and logically. That’s a great approach for a venture capitalist, a governor, a law professor. It’s a terrible approach for a president. Great presidents tend to be hedgehogs."
Daniel Drezner thinks Ron Paul - and his relentless focus on "foreign policy/national security/civil liberties" - is the hedgehog in the race: "He knows One Big Thing and uses it to construct his worldview."
But Drezner doesn't seem to accept Leibovitz' belief that great president tend to be hedgehogs. The unwillingness to compromise - which is key to being a hedgehog - undermines their ability to be effective presidents:
"I would posit that only someone who fanatically accepted this entire worldview would have been capable of inspiring the Ron Paul movement. Only those leaders with sufficient levels of ideological zeal to never compromise, never bend on principle, until they eventually reach a position of power are able to foment revolution.
. . . The great presidents -- Washington, Lincoln, FDR -- knew the when to compromise and when to stand firm, when to lead public opinion and when to follow it. They were, in other words, great politicians. The presidents who simply knew they were right on everything and resisted compromise -- Jackson, Wilson, Bush 43 -- tended towards the disastrous. Paul would be part of the latter group.
These are worth a good discussion.