Frist's BlackBerry Spring

I must admit, I am sort of a connoisseur of leadership in the U.S. Senate. It's a particular kind of skill, very different from executive leadership, because everyone you're trying to lead is an equal, and most of them are prima donnas in one way or another. If it's a corporate cliche to say that leadership involves listening, it is absolutely, literally true in the Senate. Bob Dole and George Mitchell were both superb Senate leaders for that reason, Trent Lott and Tom Daschle probably just a step below. But they were pretty well matched to each other, looking at it purely as a matter of skill.

But I suspect that we are witnessing the first real mismatch in leadership skills in a long time, in Harry Reid vs. Bill Frist. I think Reid might have pulled off something amazing yesterday, holding out the card of compromise on the Nuclear Option at just the moment when he knew that Frist could least accept it -- because he put himself so far out on the limb by making it a theological matter -- and knowing that there are any number of Republican Senators who would desperately love to see some sort of compromise, and simultaneously making clear that if the trigger is pulled, Democrats will not "shut down the Senate," but instead try to force votes on issues in the Democratic agenda that Republicans would like to be protected from voting on. That's a pretty powerful one-two punch.

I was glad to see Kos note this tactical wizardry yesterday. Often I think that in the Daily Kos community, which I will characterize not so much as the left of the party but the side that wants the Democrats to be very aggressive in opposition, there is a tendency to be quite absolutist about tactics: "never compromise," for example. "Never compromise" limits your freedom of action just as surely as "always compromise," and thus makes it harder to take advantage of opportunities to win. This is a very good example. It was a good idea not to try to compromise on Social Security in January-March, when the White House hadn't even offered its own plan, but there might be another moment when compromise is just the right move. In this case, at this moment, it was brilliant.

See this article from the Nation, for an example of getting it exactly wrong by making "never compromise" an iron law of opposition.

You can overanalyze Frist's inadequacies, but I think it's very simple: He doesn't know where his votes are. He doesn't quite know where his votes are on Bolton, he doesn't quite know where they are on the Nuclear Option. Knowing where your votes are doesn't just mean knowing how your members would vote if it happened today, it's knowing which ones might be shaky if any of a dozen other events occurs and what's going on with Senators on the other side. It's a matter of keeping hundreds and hundreds of pieces of constantly changing information in your head.

And you can only do that if you're talking face to face with every single one of your own members and many of the others, all the time. And Frist doesn't do that. Nina Easton of the Boston Globe recently quoted political scientist Sarah Binder:

''He's a BlackBerry addict," Binder noted, referring to his electronic communications with senators. ''That's not how Lyndon Johnson got it done. It takes face-to-face interaction."

The BlackBerry is a great thing -- I had one for a while and I miss it. It might be a good way to run a company. But not the Senate. Frist has other problems, too, like having Trent Lott second-guessing him and his surgeon arrogance. But the bottom line is that as long as he doesn't know where his votes are, he will be extremely vulnerable, and slowly Democrats will gain subtle control of the agenda.