WILLIAMSTOWN - Whoever wins the White House next month, conventional wisdom holds, must chart a centrist course through factional shoals toward that most sublime of political goals - bipartisanship.
Right?
Nuts, says James MacGregor Burns, America's grand old sage of political leadership, who believes that whole approach is for the birds.
Instead, he says, what this country needs are a few good fights.
''Centrism is simply inadequate,'' Burns argues. ''What's wrong with it is that it produces such incremental steps.''
The most glaring examples of its shortcomings, he believes, were the doomed efforts at compromise over slavery made by Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, trying to avert a civil war. The challenges are still there today.
''At a time when the world is changing so fast outside of government, an incremental government just can't keep up,'' says Burns, a supple 83-year-old who runs a mile every day. ''Here is a bumbling government feebly trying to catch up and not doing it very well, and in any event not taking the lead.''
Take education. ''If we were really to do something about public education in this country, it would be a revolution, a transformation beyond anything we've even thought about. What we've done in education is very incremental.''
But revolution requires conflict. Of course, a president must pick the right fights. But once he has, says Burns, he should wade into them with gusto. To that end, he refers to what FDR told a cheering crowd at Madison Square Garden in 1936 about his political enemies: ''I welcome their hatred.''
Would George W. Bush or Al Gore utter anything like that today?
''Conflict is the key to great leadership,'' Burns maintains. ''Both Teddy Roosevelt and FDR were able to make the enemy into such demons that they created a conflict situation which they exploited.''
Teddy Roosevelt, he continues, is the more interesting example because he had no great war or depression to mine. But he pursued a jihad against the trusts - a radical tack at the start of the 20th century - and created a national park system from scratch. Big stuff.
Fights are the inevitable result of conviction, which along with values defines political leadership. ''Values are absolutely essential,'' says Burns, ''but there is so much confusion about what we mean by values. They are different from ethics or the virtue that my fellow Williams alumnus Bill Bennett talks about.
''Values to me are the top historic, fundamental principles of American democracy. That sounds trite, but the American people really believe in things like liberty and equality.''
Values and conviction are why Burns, an old lefty who ran unsuccessfully for Congress against Republican Silvio Conte in 1958, has high regard for Ronald Reagan.
''Leadership is conviction. That's why Reagan will do better among historians as time goes on. He's already coming up.''
What most impresses Burns about Reagan is what disappoints him about Clinton: how the two men handled themselves in defeat. ''Typically, the politician says after losing, `I made a mistake. I should pull out of it.' Reagan didn't.''
In contrast, after his massive health insurance initiative failed early in his presidency, Clinton ran from the issue.
''His reaction was to get the hell away from it, almost shame-faced,'' says Burns. ''It was as if he said, `Gee, what a terrible mistake. How can we have done that? We won't do that again.'''
So how do Bush and Gore stack up as leaders? Do they have the potential to be ''transformative,'' a term Burns coined to describe the ability to elevate the country toward great goals? Or will they remain transactional incrementalists, pursuing more modest goals in digestible bites?
Burns holds that Gore has the potential to be a transformative leader in a way Clinton never was. Jaws will drop at this notion. But where many found the Al Gore that was illuminated by Nicholas Lemann in a New Yorker magazine profile last spring to be bizarre, Burns found him fascinating.
''What would happen if you asked both men would they would do when one value competes with another - equality with liberty, for example? If you sat down with Gore, my guess is he would not only talk about it, he might bore us to death about it, hour after hour. I would expect that Bush would be lost.''
Burns cannnot find the transformative in the Texas governor. ''I don't see that quality in Bush,'' he says. ''I'd like to. It may be there. Again, we academics tend to be bigoted and judgmental. Perhaps the presidential campaign is just not the time to bring that out.''
''The real Bush to me is attractive. He has a lovely manner - easy, relaxed. There is also ambition and a certain courage. But I don't see much beyond that.''
Bush is not without his strengths, though. ''I think he could be a great transactional leader, a great broker. If elected, I'd expect he'd be a moderate, a centrist, a consensus-builder. I don't see him as a reactionary.''
The differences between the two nominees, he believes, would explode in great economic crisis. ''At some point there will be a real downturn. How will they deal with it?'' he asks. ''I think Bush would be absolutely flummoxed. Gore, in an economic crisis, would use FDR as a great example, so I think you'd see a real contrast between the two.''
Are there any transformative leaders on the American scene today? Burns names Bill Bradley as a man with such potential and, when asked about John McCain, adds him as well. But the list is distressingly short.
One who aspires to Burns's elite is Ralph Nader, the renegade Green Party nominee. Nader telephoned Burns ''out of the blue'' a few weeks ago to learn about transformative leadership. Burns also talked to him about the importance of conflict in the mix - an angle that Nader had apparently not entertained - and later faxed him Franklin Roosevelt's entire Madison Square Garden speech.
Burns and one of his old students, historian Michael R. Beschloss, have a $10 bet about Gore's first actions as president, should he be elected. Burns believes Gore would honor his campaign rhetoric and make the first piece of legislation he sent to Congress campaign finance reform. Beschloss remains skeptical.
Today, Burns holes up in a converted barn full of books and dust motes outside of Williamstown with a splendid view of the Berkshires. The man has two new books coming out and teaches at The James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. (At his alma mater, Burns is professor emeritus of political science.)
He still writes in longhand and then types on an ancient IBM Selectric that is literally held together with string.
Tall and lanky, with a nimbus of white hair, Burns stokes the fire and endures endless faxes and telephone calls from people of all stripes seeking advice and counsel. Having studied political leadership for over half a century, he has pretty much cornered the market on the subject and is vulnerable to this kind of thing.
Burns prefaced his last book, ''Dead Center,'' in which he lambasted the centrism of Clinton, with a poem by Yeats called ''Second Coming'' that includes the line: ''The best lack all conviction.''
What does that mean?
''I think Yeats felt the absence, particularly in the democratic world, of leaders who would not constantly trade their promises after they're elected,'' says Burns. ''It's what I call the flabbiness of democracy.''
