The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersanalytic inquiry. We get to know a person's character in the presi-
dency, as in ordinary life, by paying attention to the steady accumu-
lation of choices we see him make, both in and away from the public
spotlight. Character is reflected as much in a president's observable
behavior as it is in the deepest recesses of his psyche.
The Character-Performance Framework
The framework developed in Renshon ic>c)6b and applied to Presi-
dent Clinton (Renshon 1996a) and later to Republican presidential
candidate Robert Dole (Renshon 1998a) draws on a theory of char-
acter with three major elements. Ambition is the domain of a person's
aspirations and the skills that he or she has developed to reali2e
them. We must all figure out what we want to do in life and refine
the skills that help us realize these ambitions, if we are to be suc-
cessful.
Character integrity is the domain of a person's ideals and values—
the moral, ethical, and motivational principles that provide a true-
to-self compass through choices. Every person must develop princi-
ples for navigating life's inevitable, but often unclear or difficult,
choices. Some will aspire to high ideals but will fail to put them into
practice. Others will be guided primarily by self-interest but will
present their choices as if they are in the public's interests. A smaller
number will struggle to remain faithful to their ideals, even when it
is difficult to do so.
Relatedness refers to the domain of our interpersonal relationships,
the nature and quality of our relationships with others. Every person
exists and lives in an ocean of others. Others are our friends and our
enemies, our allies and our competitors, and our most trusted and
intimate relations; we may move toward, away, or against others, or
stand apart from them, but we cannot avoid them (Horney 1937).
They are as central to our emotional lives as oxygen is to our physi-
cal ones.
It is important to underscore that these three elements of charac-
ter serve as a framework for analysis. They reflect a theory hinging on
the proposition that the three elements are essential and interrelated.
However, unlike Barber's ([1972] 1992) theory of presidential char-
acter or Lasswell's (1930) theory of democratic or political character
types, this framework has no pretensions to exhaustive, mutually