Word: hedgehogness
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...knows many things," wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing." In his famous 1953 essay, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin used that conceit to divide Russian writers into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs, he suggested, are individuals who relate everything to a single, all embracing principle, while foxes are those who see a multiplicity of things without fitting them into some universal system. (Dostoevsky was a hedgehog, Tolstoy a fox.) Berlin regarded this contrast as a profound philosophical difference that divided writers, thinkers and even politicians...
This election season, the Dole campaign is depicting the presidential race as a battle between a Republican hedgehog and a Democratic fox. Republicans portray their candidate as a homespun political hedgehog, a man with a simple, overarching view of America, while representing Bill Clinton as a sharp-eyed political fox, a candidate who has, as Bob Dole says, "a million little plans." Dole repeatedly contrasts his "one big plan" with Clinton's "inch-by-inch" approach. The subtext of Dole's message, beginning with his Senate resignation speech, in which he described himself as "just a man," is that...
...Dole, by nature as well as nurture, is a fox. When he was lambasted during the primaries for lacking a vision, it was another way of saying, Bob, you're no hedgehog. Dole's beloved job of majority leader is the ultimate fox's occupation. "Bob Dole knew more about more things than anyone else in the Senate," says Lawrence O'Donnell, former staff director of the Senate Finance Committee. "And that was the source of his power." The fox incarnate...
...teen smoking to anti-inflation bonds, using them to underscore a single, optimistic view of the country and the future. (I see many things, and I see one big thing too.) It was fallen guru Dick Morris who tried to make the case that Clinton was the great postideological hedgehog, the unifier of divergent strains in American political thought. Clinton, Morris said, is "the end product of the debate between Democrats and Republicans this century." He used this Hegelian dialectic to describe Clinton as the modern ideological synthesizer of traditionally Republican ideas (balancing the budget) and Democratic nostrums (raising...
Ronald Reagan was the great postwar hedgehog, and candidates ever since have of necessity sought that same aura. George Bush was as poor at managing "the vision thing" as Dole. In this presidential parlor game, George Washington was a hedgehog, John Adams a fox. Abraham Lincoln was a hedgehog, Harry Truman a fox. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a fox who grew into a supreme hedgehog. Richard Nixon lost as a fox in 1960 but won as a hedgehog in 1968. National crises both demand and create hedgehogs, and hedgehogs go down in history as the great Presidents. And in this...