What lessons in moral behavior for aspiring presidents may we take away from the events of recent campaigns? With Herman Cain's campaign suspension over accusations of extramarital affairs, the candidate who has risen to first place among Republicans is none other than former Speaker of the House

On televised news this evening, expect to hear sentences beginning with "some people say" or "many people think" as a means of positioning a question for an interview or providing support for an opinion being advanced. Look for such deceptive phrases on your choice of early evening televised news, CNN...

"Shame is dead, officially dead in American public life," Mark Shields has observed. He's not alone in this view. Even Tom Hanks, ever optimistic, believes that while 80 percent of people are good -- the rest are crooks and liars.

How mean-spirited...

Congressman Patrick Kennedy said yesterday on opening day of the One Mind Research Conference he convened in Boston: "The most personal thing any family can ask for is to help them take care of the people they love." In this sense, Kennedy added, "Politics is personal." It's a...

President Obama tends not to get out in front of image problems. In fact, his analytical leadership style inclines him toward quite the opposite. His response to the birthers and their latest ringleader Donald Trump is a case in point. It took the president a long time to...

The term "mean girls" grabs. It's a function of word association -- close to an oxymoron if we think of girls as "sugar and spice and everything nice." Of course, they aren't. Who is? But neither are they meaner than their male counterparts. In fact, the last time I looked,...

No doubt you've been put on the spot, cornered in conversation or didn't quite feel you could say what you wanted to say. Maybe this happened with your spouse, friend, doctor, colleague, son or daughter. There just didn't seem to be a good way to tell him or her what...

The next time you hear the word "bipartisan," think coward. If no one notices, word substitution can be a very effective persuasion device. Someone says to you, "You're stubborn," and you reply, "I am persistent." It's a useful technique and can be a respectable one -- but not when used...

If you haven't yet seen The King's Speech -- you should.

Having heard so many good things about the movie, I was sure that my expectations would be too high and I'd be disappointed. That didn't happen. I'd see The King's Speech again in a...

Tomorrow is the day -- the one when you surprise people. Why not? After all, being predictable does two things none of us should want: (1) Makes us easily managed by others who know how we'll react, and (2) Makes us boring. Neither is good for relationships -- whether personal...

I've been thinking about the calls for greater civility delivered eloquently by President Obama and many in the media. David Brooks, for example, with whom on occasion I've disagreed, wrote of civility as "the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers...

Each of us is at least 75 percent responsible for how others treat us. If they are disdainful and we do not respond in a way that causes them to change their tone and attitude, then we essentially encourage them to continue to berate us.

This is what...

On 60 Minutes Sunday you may have seen a story about John Boehner, presumptive speaker of the House. He cried a few times, almost losing it once. And yet he's one of the most powerful people in Washington.

While it's interesting that men like George Bush, Mitt...

Leaving aside the controversy surrounding President Obama's proposed tax cut "deal," he is becoming his own worst enemy. Yesterday's demonstration of how to alienate as many people as possible was a disaster. Who is advising him?

After a few words about priorities, Obama shifted into a...

Income inequality is about to get worse, according to David Segal's article in Sunday's New York Times. Those of us not in the beneficiary column, the article suggests, had better start thinking of which "artisanal services" we can provide. In short, we need to identify what the rich...

This level of GOP hostility is an image the president should keep firmly in his mind. Spring loaded to a hostile position is a frame and frame of mind he should stop to remember before meeting with any of that party's members.

The vote against

Recently a reporter asked a question I get asked often now: Is dependence on social technology hurting how people communicate? Are we less agile than before, less attentive to nonverbal cues because, frankly, we're getting out of practice? So many messages, including ones where two people break off a relationship,...

That was one of the criticisms of candidate Barack Obama -- that he would be learning on the job how to be president. It seemed a bit scary, but worth the risk as he had so much to offer. But now, don't you find yourself wishing he would learn on...

Many of us learned as children about the nineteenth-century American statesman and Secretary of State, Henry Clay, known also as the "great compromiser." A man admired by Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, no doubt he was a skilled statesman and communicator.

Years after initially learning about...

Perhaps we are like Samuel Beckett's characters Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot. These men wait for a man they admit to hardly knowing but nonetheless someone they expect to change their lives. They anticipate he will sort out their problems. Yet as they wait and wait,...