Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin speaks with Chief Justice Frank J. Williams before speaking at Roger Williams University last night.

>

The Providence Journal Ruben W. Perez

BRISTOL –– Doris Kearns Goodwin, the noted author and historian, last night offered a simple guide for judging today’s presidential candidates: check how each one stacks up against Abraham Lincoln.

Speaking before a record crowd in the gymnasium at Roger Williams University, Goodwin listed 10 leadership qualities that Lincoln possessed –– from the willingness to hear dissent to the ability to relax — and said they could serve as measures of a candidate’s worthiness.

“I so wish the reporters could find a better way to cover the campaign,” Goodwin said, urging the media to focus on “past performance and leadership style,” rather than ever-changing poll results.

Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has written about presidents, politics and baseball, was speaking as part of the university’s “Civil Discourse” lecture, which focuses this year on “The American Presidency.”

University president Roy J. Nirschel told the crowd that Goodwin was the most popular speaker so far, filling the gymnasium with “one less than the fire marshal allows.” A university spokesman said that 1,250 people acquired tickets and an additional 1,625 signed up to watch the speech on television in overflow rooms.

Goodwin was introduced by Frank J. Williams, chief justice of Rhode Island’s Supreme Court, a member of the university’s Board of Overseers and a Lincoln scholar. Williams described Goodwin as a friend and they embraced when she walked on stage.

Goodwin held out President Lincoln’s strengths as examples of what Americans should look for in their next leader.

Lincoln was resilient, able to spring back from failure and adversity, she said. He was unafraid to surround himself with better known and better educated people who would argue with him, but still was able to eventually stop the argument and make a decision. And Lincoln was “willing to learn on the job and profit from mistakes.” Goodwin found evidence of those three qualities in both the Republican nominee, John McCain, and the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama.

Lincoln also had an ability “to connect emotionally with people inside the government and the public at large.” McCain, she said, connects with people when he speaks of honor and patriotism, but less so when talking about problems in their daily lives. In contrast, “Obama’s great strength has been his emotional connection with the people.”

Lincoln could “manage emotions and contain anger.” McCain, she said, lets his anger get in his way, as when he failed to look at Obama in the first debate and called him “that one” in the second. Obama revealed his pique when he called primary opponent Hillary Clinton “likable enough” but has since shown himself to be “more cool, more steady,” Goodwin said.

Lincoln knew how “to relax and replenish his energies”; it’s not clear how today’s candidates manage that.

Lincoln also stepped up to the plate in a crisis. “At crisis moments,” Goodwin said, “his immediate instinct was to face the situation directly, to go to the battlefield, visit the soldiers in the hospital.” In the midst of today’s financial crisis, neither candidate has shown the necessary leadership, she said.

Lincoln’s other qualities were a willingness to hold fast to his convictions even when unpopular, and an ability to speak with “shared meaning” that moves the public. Finally, and perhaps most important, Lincoln’s ambitions were grounded in a desire to make the world a better place and to accomplish something so worthwhile that he would not be forgotten.

Goodwin compared presidential campaigns past and present. At the end of the 19th century William McKinley was able to conduct his entire campaign from his front porch; today’s candidates jet-hop from one campaign stop to another. Today, she said, “Candidates have less authentic contact with both people and reporters, and reporters have less intimate contact with candidates.”

Some things haven’t changed: The decisive role of money. The negative attacks and dirty tricks. McKinley’s campaign manager managed to get notes placed in workers’ paychecks saying that if his opponent won, “this will be your last paycheck.”

“In some ways,” Goodwin said, “the dirty tricks in the old days were more fun.” Supporters of John F. Kennedy dressed up as pregnant nuns and carried signs bearing opponent Richard Nixon’s slogan: “He’s the one.” That’s very different, she said, from the McCain campaign’s assertion that Obama “pals around with terrorists.”

ffreyer@projo.com