Personalities play an important role in every election. We all want to support a candidate who is charismatic and inspiring, and we all want a leader who can relate to us and to whom we can relate. Today, I want to take a look at the personalities of the candidates and provide you with my views on the importance of their personalities.
Let’s start with Obama. He is smooth, articulate, polished, charismatic, inspiring, and good looking. He has a nice-looking family. He is an excellent communicator who has great speech writers and superb delivery when speaking from a prepared text. He creates excitement. He reminds me of a charismatic evangelical preacher who fills the pews with thousands of eager people every Sunday. He sounds good, and he makes you feel good by appealing to your emotions. Obama has very effective slogans, such as “change you can believe in” and “this is our moment,” but these slogans are low on substance and high on emotion. Obama’s goal is to ride into the White House on a wave of emotion with as little attention as possible to his experience (or lack thereof), his voting record, and his position on the issues.
McCain has an inspiring life story, but he does not have an inspiring personality. He clearly is no match for Obama when it comes to charisma or his ability to excite a crowd. I have not heard any instances of people fainting with excitement at the sight of McCain entering the room. McCain is unimpressive when speaking from a prepared text but is much more impressive in an informal setting where, because of his extensive experience, he can respond quickly and directly to questions on almost any subject.
Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, is extremely knowledgeable and experienced but is about as uninspiring as McCain. McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, reminds me of Obama. Like Obama, Palin has limited experience, but she has inspired a large number of people based on her charisma and the force of her personality. To my amazement, McCain’s selection of Palin as his running mate has energized his campaign and given him a huge boost in the polls, at least temporarily. Millions of people have fallen in love with Palin just as others fell in love with Obama.
In a recent column, Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for The Washington Post, wrote, “Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. ….Obama’s meteoric rise was not based on issues—there was not a dime’s worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues—but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.” Krauthammer further wrote that Obama, as he campaigned, “began believing in his own magical powers—the chants, the swoons, the ‘we are the ones’ self-infatuation. Like Ronald Reagan, he was leading a movement, but one entirely driven by personality. Reagan’s revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state regulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama’s movement, the man is the transcendence.”
The President of the United States needs to be a strong leader, and many strong leaders are inspiring and charismatic. But a charismatic leader can be a good thing or a bad thing. Adolph Hitler was a strong leader. He was a powerful speaker who was charismatic and inspiring and who could excite a crowd. He inspired hundreds of thousands of German citizens to follow policies that resulted in the murder of millions of Jews and led to World War II. Likewise, in the corporate world, there have been many examples of chief executive officers who were charismatic and inspiring leaders and who, through the force of their personalities, convinced their boards of directors and subordinates to adopt strategies that resulted in bankruptcy.
Although charisma is important, it is not essential to good leadership. I have known many outstanding leaders who did not have charismatic personalities and were not inspiring speakers. They were great leaders because they were well respected for their experience and their superior knowledge of the business or organization they were leading, they treated their employees and customers well, they were fair to everyone, they worked harder than anyone else, they inspired confidence because of their past achievements, and they were modest rather than arrogant. I think McCain, despite his lack of charisma, can be and would be a good leader because he possesses many of the other qualities necessary for leadership.
The ideal candidate for President would be charismatic and inspiring, would have great leadership skills, would have extensive experience and a record of achievement, would have a demonstrated history of independence and bipartisanship, and would have a voting record that is consistent with his or her position on the issues. We do not have such a candidate in this race. Even though charisma and leadership skills are important, I am more interested in evaluating the candidates based on their experience, their records, and their positions on the issues. This is the best way I know to determine how a candidate would lead the country if elected.
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