The one thing that the President can do is to establish a real energy independence plan. We have all the recources we need right here in this country to establish energy independence if we had the leadership.

Ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way including George Bush senior Gerald Ford and others including myself and Bill Clinton.

Presidential leadership needn't always cost money. Look for low- and no-cost options. They can be surprisingly effective.

In our system leadership is by consent not command. To lead a President must persuade. Personal contacts and experiences help shape his thinking. They can be critical to his persuasiveness and thus to his leadership.

For example I spent a lot of time with Reagan both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.

There is a universal intelligent life force that exists within everyone and everything. It resides within each one of use as a deep wisdom an inner knowing. We can access this wonderful source of knowledge and wisdom through our intuition an inner sense that tells us what feels right and true for us at any given moment.

In the past I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.

I wish I had known more firsthand about the concerns and problems of American businesspeople while I was a U.S. senator and later a presidential nominee. That knowledge would have made me a better legislator and a more worthy aspirant to the White House.

The standard rumor at the time was that Rumsfeld as chief of staff had persuaded President Ford to appoint George H.W. Bush as director of Central Intelligence assuming that that got rid of a potential competitor for the presidency.

Affairs of state tend to drive most presidents toward the center on both foreign and domestic policy no matter where on the political spectrum they begin and especially so in the areas of intelligence and law enforcement.