charisma
Maybe we're over-analyzing this. Maybe elections are more about charisma than anything else. Clinton had it, Bush Sr. didn't. Clinton won. Clinton had it, Dole didn't. Clinton won. And Clinton ran on a platform that included opening the military to gays and providing "socialistic" universal healthcare!
By charisma I mean the ability to impart a sense of a unique and clearly distinguishable self -- even if the projected self is a total lie -- through millions of cues that have nothing to do with the actual content of what one has to say. Reagan certainly had it, a ton of it, and he'd be president right now, from the grave, if it weren't for term limits.
Maybe it's not so much about End of the Enlightenment as it is about the Democrats having chosen too humdrum of a candidate.
2 Comments:
I agree. I think turning on the TV with an undecided mind about who to vote for and finding Kerry as the challenger is kind of uninspiring. Maybe Edwards would have done better? Maybe next time?
I think Edwards would at least have been better. I even think the American people(s) could have found Dean's infamous scream charming in the same way that they (apparently) find Bush's incoherence proof that he's a "regular guy". In the end, no matter how silly it was, I think that the take-away message would have been "this guy's not afraid to let everyone know how feels; that means he's not just pretending and that I don't have to second-guess where he's coming from".
It's interesting to me that we immediately put the blame for our loss on everything but the Democratic Party Establishment. We blame ourselves for not working hard enough to get out the vote, for not building bridges to voters in the red states, for underestimating the power of religion; we blame voters in the red states for their mean-spiritedness and prioritization of belief over truth; and we blame the republicans for their cynical lies and manipulations, for not playing fairly . . . but I've heard very little criticism of the Democratic Machine that chooses and coaches the candidates, that funds and runs the campaigns. It seems that this is precisely the organization from which we should expect an explanation, for it's in this organization that we placed our time, money, and trust.
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