Those who oppose him in both parties are attacking Barack Obama with a double-barreled cultural stereotype, the old film noir thesis that good looks can be deceptive combined with a Jim Jones analogy about followers suicidally drinking in hope with laced Kool-Aid.
In today's New York Times, Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and Clinton supporter, observes, "What is troubling about the campaign is that it’s gone beyond hope and change to redemption.” He claims that Obama is "posing as a figure who is the one person who will redeem our politics. And what I fear is, that ends up promising more from politics than politics can deliver.”
Earlier this week, Paul Krugman wrote that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality."
Today's Times piece quotes Norman Mailer describing JFK's arrival at the Democratic convention in 1960, “the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street.”
The reporter should have gone further into Mailer's musings on Kennedy. Substitute "African-American" for "Catholic" in this passage:
"With such a man in office, the myth of the nation would again be engaged, and the fact that he was a Catholic would engage the mind of the White Protestant. For the first time in our history, the Protestant would have the pain and creative luxury of feeling himself in some tiny degree part of a minority, and that was an experience which might be incommensurable in its value to the best of them."
It's understandable that detractors would try to equate Obama's emotional appeal to lack of substance. In the 1960s, when I was editing McCalls, an advertiser told me, "Your competitors say the magazine looks so good that readers don't get to the ads."
"If I had to sell a dull magazine," I answered, "I might make say that too, but if you can't get people to pay attention, they won't respond to anything."
This year, Obama is getting voters to pay attention, and his opponents are reduced to finding fault with that.
Showing posts with label charisma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label charisma. Show all posts
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Monday, August 27, 2007
Democrats' Fatal Flaw?
If a new book, “The Political Brain,” is right, the Democrats should nominate Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton.
But like most big “ifs,” it’s not as simple as that. Drew Westen’s thesis that emotions rather than rationality govern voters’ choices is true up to a point, but based on half a century of experience, far from the whole story.
After two Bush elections, it’s tempting to conclude that the way to win is to go for the gut and, looking even further back, explain a Democratic parade of losers—Humphrey, Mondale, Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry--as too cerebral in the face of pit-of-the-stomach Republican attacks like the Willie Horton and Swift Boat ads.
But appealing to voters’ brains or hearts has never been an either-or, as John F. Kennedy showed in 1960. He did both and won. But after that, even those Democrats who made it--Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter--did so less on “charisma” than circumstance (JFK’s assassination, Nixon’s disgrace) until Bill Clinton, who put convention-goers to sleep with his speech in 1988 made an about-face four years later and took advantage of Bush I’s lack of “the vision thing.”
What both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have to recognize is that a Presidential campaign is not a job interview/intelligence test. Voters want to know about issues but now, more than ever, they are judging character: Who are you? What do you really believe? What will you do under pressure?
Last year Obama vaulted onto the scene based on a response to his freshness and candor but, in the heat of competitive campaigning, has fallen into quibbling over he-said, she said. Clinton has opened a lead in the polls with a sure-handed, mistake-free approach to leverage her claims of superior experience.
But if either of them is to make it all the way against a Giuliani or Fred Thompson, who will keep it simple and emotional, they will have to recognize that you can’t beat demagoguery with reason alone.
After George Bush, voters will be receptive to a President with brains. But even more than that, they will be looking for someone they can trust, like and admire. It’s been a long time.
But like most big “ifs,” it’s not as simple as that. Drew Westen’s thesis that emotions rather than rationality govern voters’ choices is true up to a point, but based on half a century of experience, far from the whole story.
After two Bush elections, it’s tempting to conclude that the way to win is to go for the gut and, looking even further back, explain a Democratic parade of losers—Humphrey, Mondale, Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry--as too cerebral in the face of pit-of-the-stomach Republican attacks like the Willie Horton and Swift Boat ads.
But appealing to voters’ brains or hearts has never been an either-or, as John F. Kennedy showed in 1960. He did both and won. But after that, even those Democrats who made it--Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter--did so less on “charisma” than circumstance (JFK’s assassination, Nixon’s disgrace) until Bill Clinton, who put convention-goers to sleep with his speech in 1988 made an about-face four years later and took advantage of Bush I’s lack of “the vision thing.”
What both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have to recognize is that a Presidential campaign is not a job interview/intelligence test. Voters want to know about issues but now, more than ever, they are judging character: Who are you? What do you really believe? What will you do under pressure?
Last year Obama vaulted onto the scene based on a response to his freshness and candor but, in the heat of competitive campaigning, has fallen into quibbling over he-said, she said. Clinton has opened a lead in the polls with a sure-handed, mistake-free approach to leverage her claims of superior experience.
But if either of them is to make it all the way against a Giuliani or Fred Thompson, who will keep it simple and emotional, they will have to recognize that you can’t beat demagoguery with reason alone.
After George Bush, voters will be receptive to a President with brains. But even more than that, they will be looking for someone they can trust, like and admire. It’s been a long time.
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