Expedient or Principled?

One doesn't have to listen long to the current president before one is told to "Listen..." or "Hear me..."  It should make one nervous when one is always having to be the one listening. This puts the "listener" (if one actually agrees to listen) in the position of one instructed - like a student or possibly small child.
      When someone is always saying, "Listen..." it comes across as, well, arrogance. It seems clear a leader, especially, must be willing to "Listen..." and to understand, and to weigh, and to contemplate in order to be an effective leader.

      I am not totally sure I have the word I want but expedient comes to mind when thinking about the agenda being pushed upon America. The word carries the meaning of speed and has positive meanings with respect to making right decisions and when speed is appropriate. But it also carries the meaning of serving "one's own purpose." That's the meaning which is close to the mark.  Is it right for a leader, particularly a president, to act with determined haste and, in that haste, with disregard for others trying to be heard, and with such a feel of "one's own purpose" at the center of the talking and activity?
      Compare expedience with what William Lee Miller calls Abraham Lincoln's moral leadership. "The dominant mode of expression of his mind was not quickness, speedy analysis, rapid-fire response. He did not use his extraordinarily good memory to reproduce what he remembered with eclat. He did not characteristically do what Samuel Johnson tried to restrain himself from doing: "talking for victory" - scoring points on others, displaying what he knew, winning contests of knowledge. He did not aim to be, and never became a learned man... Lincoln's mind instead cut deeply, perhaps slowly or at least with effort and concentrated attention, into a relatively few subjects. It was purposive -  personally, politically, morally. 

     Lincoln was not facile or glib, nor could he call up an immense range of knowledge. Faster talking products of a later urban world would have interrupted him while he was pausing for his first semicolon. 
     He would become a thinker in particular about moral ideals as they intersect with politics. And his qualities mind meant not only that facts and ideas, once acquired, stayed with him, but that political and moral positions, once he worked them out, would not be lightly abandoned. (Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography; Vintage; 2002; p. 13-14
     He once responded to a public charge brought by Frederick Douglass, calling Lincoln "slow and vacillating." In effect - he told Douglass it was fine to call him "slow". But with respect to vacillating, Lincoln could not bear that charge. He told Douglass it was an unsubstantiated charge and did not believe it could be shown where he had retreated from a position which he had taken the time to reason through.

      This is an outstanding quality of a fine leader - arriving at positions not by speed and a course which best serves one's own interests - but digging to the moral marrow of the matter. Arriving at principles which are substantial, proven, timeless, and perhaps slow-moving under-gird a reasonable, careful, thoughtful, effective leader.