Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Obama Doesn’t Have Charisma

8 Comments

He’s glamourous. Virginia Postrel, a glamour maven, explains:

Charisma is a personal quality that inspires followers to embrace the charismatic leader’s agenda (an agenda that, in the original sense of the word charisma, is seen as divinely inspired.) Glamour, by contrast, encourages the audience to project its own yearnings onto the glamorous figure. So, in this case, Sebastian Mallaby imagines that Obama will find “a way of crawling back from his embarrassing talk of reopening NAFTA.” Mallaby maintains his own views about what’s good for economic growth; he doesn’t defer to Obama’s own vision.

When voters motivated by charisma disagree with the leader they’ve backed, they support him anyway and possibly even change their minds about the right policy course. When voters motivated by glamour disagree, they become disillusioned and angry.

Let’s hope for a peak of that come around late October.

8 thoughts on “Obama Doesn’t Have Charisma”

  1. Obama does have this:

    Milton and Rose Friedman’s son, David, is signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father’s cause.

    Heh!

    In context:

    The New Yorker is hardly the optimal vehicle for reaching the conservative intelligentsia. But, last year, Barack Obama cooperated with a profile for that magazine where he seemed to be speaking directly to the right. Because he paid obeisance to the virtues of stability and continuity, his interlocutor, Larissa MacFarquhar, came away with the impression that the Illinois senator was an adherent of Edmund Burke: “In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative.”

    As The New Yorker’s assessment shot across blogs, many conservatives listened eagerly. A broad swath of the movement has been in open revolt against George W. Bush–and the Republican Party establishment–for some time. They don’t much care for the Iraq war or the federal government’s vast expansion over the last seven-and-a-half years. And, in the eyes of these discontents, the nomination of John McCain only confirmed the continuation of the worst of the Bush-era deviations from first principles.

    Link:

    http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=46a816dc-f843-41ec-9fe4-fbeac17bcfca

  3. Barack Obama cooperated with a profile for that magazine where he seemed to be speaking directly to the right.

    Now if only the right had the same tendency as the left to believe in what a man says more than what he does.

  4. Milton and Rose Friedman’s son, David, is signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father’s cause.

    Uh Oh. You’ve given Simby a new target of hate.

  6. if only the right had the same tendency as the left to believe in what a man says more than what he does.

    You mean like the right’s ritual obeisance to “small government” and “starve the beast”… despite the rock-solid evidence that for 40 years now, both government spending and government employment have grown faster under Republican administrations (and Republican-dominated congresses) than under Democrats?

    I’d call that a tendency “to believe what Goldwater said more than what Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have done.” If that’s your idea of hard-headed realism, you’re welcome to it.

  7. David Friedman has signed on with Barack Obama? That is certainly not the David Friedman I knew from Congressman Phil Crane’s Conservative Leadership speaker series from my youth on the North Side of Chicago.

    I say we need “stronger laws” regarding Libertarians/Conservatives who become turncoats.

    (OK, OK, if this joke is not gotten, I will have to rewrite it).

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