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On Leadership: Is Sarah Palin offering a plan -- or just an attitude?

Donald F. Kettl is dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of many books, including "The Next Government of the United States" and "Leadership at the Fed."

Sarah Palin needs to take a page from Yogi Berra's well-thumbed book: "When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!" She's doing well by leading a group that doesn't want a leader, but in doing so she risks separating herself from the rest of the country. She needs to be able to go down both forks if she's going to earn her leadership chops.

Palin has tapped into a deep vein of profound disaffection with the tea partiers, but it's a weak strategy to bet the future on a group so alienated from politics that the only thing it can agree on is that it doesn't want to be led. She's got a voice that resonates wonderfully with lots of people who just don't like government. Palin is the charismatic poster child for "the party of no." She taps powerfully into the anxiety of voters who don't much like government and who are worried about their economic future.

How far can she go by leading with an attitude instead of a plan? She proved in Nashville that she can draw big crowds by tapping into the emerging army of populist/libertarians. But even the tea partiers at some point will need a flag behind which to gather and march. So the first step in building her leadership base is to translate her charisma into a direction. It's one thing to stir people to action. It's another to show them which way to go.

Then there's the problem of building support to get to 50 percent of the electorate. To get beyond her base, she needs to prove her substantive chops, both to demolish Tina Fey's brilliant caricature that still hangs over her from the 2008 campaign and to branch beyond her intense but narrow base. But those very steps risk undermining her base support.

A Reagan-era ambassador and arms control director, Ken Adelman is co-founder and vice president of Movers & Shakespeares, which offers executive training and leadership development.

Just what she's doing -- no, not as a presidential candidate, but as a political celebrity. Leadership entails matching your skill set with your career, and I think Sarah Palin is doing that quite well.

Her skill set sure isn't governing. She barely handled being governor of Alaska, let alone president of the United States. That became clear when all her boasting about the new pipeline, selling the state aircraft, the bridge and then road to nowhere turned out to be untrue.

That's why she left office early, and without any coherent explanation. She couldn't say that she was doing the obvious: fleeing from any responsibility for governing. No, her skill set is in speaking and connecting to audiences -- mocking and sharing resentments so they boil up. She's a great performer -- in the actor/oratorical sense rather than in the doer/managerial sense. She's adept at the shout-out, not the figure-out or plan-out.

Hence she's remarkably like Shakespeare's King Richard II -- a great drama-king of the stage and screen (now, mobile or computer screen). He, like she, is enticing to watch and enjoy but a distinct failure in governing.

Part of her remarkable watchability -- a new word, meaning the lure to watch someone -- is the whiff that this supreme tea party hostess might just run for president. The audience's intrigue would plummet if this supposition were removed from the Palin phenomenon. It's a key part of her shtick. And Palin, so gifted in her particular skill set, realizes and exploits it.

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