Editorial: What kind of president do you want?

If you could pick a single character trait you’d like to see in the next U.S. president, what quality would you choose?

How about empathy?

Marv KnoxOf course, a successful president must possess a deep and diverse range of skills, virtues and aptitudes. Empathy complements them all. For example, empathy tempers wisdom, leavens experience, strengthens resolve and adds purpose to talent. Empathy creates a human-shaped template for interpreting foreign and domestic policies. It provides a clear lens for examining chaotic and confusing situations.

Empathy also rounds off the rough edges of weakness. It lends humility to inexperience, thwarts arrogance and breaks down walls of isolation, opening up possibilities for partnership and collaboration.

Americans who stress the president must protect the nation and its citizens no doubt downgrade the value of empathy. Likewise for people who want the next president to break the governmental deadlock with Congress. Ditto for those who seek international trade dominance, stronger judicial nominees, and better relationships with our foreign allies as well as states and cities.

A resilient and durable virtue

However, empathy naysayers underestimate the resilience and durability of this useful virtue. A president—or anyone, for that matter—who has the ability to empathize gains advantages in practically every area of performance.

An empathetic president is most likely to listen to others and then develop and promote useful solutions for American’s problems and challenges, whether they belong to the unemployed, small-business owners, students, professional and hourly workers, the self-employed, government workers and the rest. Empathy provides the ability to see and identify with all kinds of people and work for the common good.

Similarly, an acute sense of empathy can enable the president to provide unparalleled global leadership. Who better to work toward ceasefires, treaties, trade agreements and other international pacts than someone capable of understanding the specific needs, insecurities, goals and aspirations of people—including fellow leaders, but also ordinary citizens—from all kinds of nations and societies?

Tenacity to fix a broken system

Empathy can provide the next president the tenacity to prod our nation to fix the broken parts of our political system. A president who identifies with all Americans—Republicans and Democrats, all races and ethnicities, every religion, and each perspective and persuasion—is best equipped to push relentlessly for the common good. Empathy supplies power to stand up to special interests, even the president’s own. A president who sees human beings—individuals of all sorts—in every challenging perspective is the kind of person who can articulate shared values and passions and aspirations.

Empathy is a shared human trait, but it’s also valued explicitly by Jewish and Christian traditions. The Old Testament’s affirmation of sanctuary cities and years of jubilee implicitly affirms empathy. The prophets’ cries for social and economic justice explicitly value empathy for strangers, aliens, newcomers, the unfortunate.

Jesus embodied empathy when he proclaimed:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor”

(Luke 4:18-19).

Expected norm

Jesus established empathy as the expected norm when he promised people would be judged according to how they treat “the least,” including the hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick and prisoners (Matthew 25:31-46).

Responding to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus spoke his most powerful, poignant parable about empathy. The Good Samaritan—“enemy” of the Jews, despised and considered beyond redemption—is Jesus’ model neighbor. He possessed empathy. He identified with a beaten Jew. He transcended historic, religious and ethnic barriers with compassion and care. He modeled Jesus’ ideal: Empathy.

We need empathy now, more than ever. In our next president. In all our leaders.

And may empathy begin in our own lives, in our own thoughts, in our own behaviors.

We cannot expect to receive better than we give.