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.
Obama does have this:
Heh!
In context:
Link:
http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=46a816dc-f843-41ec-9fe4-fbeac17bcfca
Yikes. Reminds me of my baptismal promise...
"Do you reject the glamour of evil?"
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.
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.
Laura Bush:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/09/AR2008060902360.html?hpid=topnews
Someone with class. As opposed to Simby.
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.
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).
Readers who would like to know my reasons for preferring Obama to both Hilary and McCain can find them on my blog. It's more informative than reading someone else's one sentence account of my views, especially after it was edited down by yet another someone else.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=obama