Centerfield

Charisma and Weaseling

Since Rick called me out on my comment that Clark lack charisma, I've thought about it some more, and I realize that I've left out something of a connection.

In short, my sense is that the harder a politician is weaseling, the more he tends to lack charisma. And I'm not trying to pick on Clark in particular. It seems to me to be true in general for all but the most practised weasels. In Clark's case, it seems to me that Clark has been called upon to do more weaseling than usual, because he may not have spent much time thinking about domestic policy until he became a candidate, and so a large part of his policy has been crafted more with an eye to garnering votes in the democratic primary than with a genuine connection to anything he passionately believes. And on foreign policy, he's been trying to have it both ways, so every time he has to think very carefully about each word that comes out of his mouth, there's less brain left over for passionately and clearly connecting on the basis of what he really believes.

And again, let me stress that I'm not posting to pick on Clark. Notice how much less charisma Dean has these days. He's defensive, trying too hard to control his demeanor, and using so much brain on being careful that he's not connecting. How much charisma does Dean project when he has to talk about religion? Not much, because he's made the judgement that to be 100% frank is deadly to his candidacy.

And I'm not picking on Dean either. The fact is that when you speak from the heart about what you truly believe, you generally project some charisma, you make genuine person-to-person connections, unless of course what you say is very alien to your audience, if they believe something very different. And every time you take a step that tempers what you really believe in an effort not to upset some part of your audience, it becomes harder to project genuineness, passion, real leadership.

And now I'm recalling Mike Dukakis. He spent most of his general election campaign parsing words and tempering message, and he only made a too-late closing effort when he scrapped the script and started speaking more from his heart.

So I guess that when I say that it feels to me that Clark, or Dean, or Kerry, or whoever lacks charisma, what I'm really saying is that the person seems to me to not really be speaking very much from his heart. And at some point you have to choose to do this (or at least project this) to win the Presidency.