The New York Times has an Op-Ed piece this morning about the role of charisma in Presidential politics, and specifically it’s role in the rise of Barack Obama:
From the day Mr. Obama announced his candidacy, he has billed it as a movement, and himself as the agent of generational change. He has mocked his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for accusing him of raising “false hopes.” “We don’t need leaders who are telling us what we cannot do,” he said in New Hampshire. “We need a president who can tell us what we can do! What we can accomplish! Where we can take this country!”
Accounts of the campaign’s “Camp Obama” sessions, to train volunteers, have a revivalist flavor. Volunteers are urged to avoid talking about policy to potential voters, and instead tell of how they “came” to Mr. Obama.
“If you don’t talk about issues in great detail, if you do it in a way that is not the centerpiece of your campaign, of your rhetoric, then you become a blank screen,” Mr. Wilentz said. “Everybody thinks you are the vehicle of their hopes.”
And that, it seems to me, explains a large degree of Obama’s appeal. People are attracted by his message — “hope” and “change” — but try to scratch the surface of the average Obama-maniac and you’re unlikely to find a deep, or even a superficial, understanding of what specific ideas he has. Which is why, it’s not unfair to say that a cult of personality has developed around the campaign:
Today that term is all around Barack Obama — perhaps because there seems so little other way to explain how a first-term senator has managed to dazzle his way to front-runner in the race for the presidency, how he walks on water for so many supporters, and how the mere suggestion that he is, say, mortal, risks vehement objection, or at least exposing the skeptic as deeply uncool.
(…)
“What is troubling about the campaign is that it’s gone beyond hope and change to redemption,” said Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton (and a longtime friend of the Clintons). “It’s posing as a figure who is the one person who will redeem our politics. And what I fear is, that ends up promising more from politics than politics can deliver.”
On some level, using the language of redemption in George Bush’s America when you’re running about Hillary Clinton makes complete sense. Politics became poisoned during the Clinton years, and that poison has continued to rot away at the core during the Bush years. People want change, and they’re flocking to the good-looking guy who promises it.
What they don’t seem to be asking themselves is what kind of change he’ll bring, if any at all.
This scares the hell out of me. Hitler’s rise to power was largely a function of his charisma.
[...] In fact, it was probably Obama’s campaign, with their stunningly bad handling of the Canada/NAFTA story, combined with the criticism that was starting to bubble up about what seemed like uneven scrutiny on the two Democratic Presidential candidates. [...]