Obama may well win re-election -- for that, he only has to convince voters that he’s the lesser of two evils -- but the enthusiasm of his 2008 campaign has certainly vanished.
What happened? In 2008, after all, not just political pundits and regular folks were expecting big things of Obama. So were certified leadership gurus. Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California and Andy Zelleke of Harvard praised Obama for possessing “that magical quality known as charisma.”
This charisma, they predicted, would give Obama “the transformational capacity to lift the malaise that is paralyzing so many Americans today” because “a charismatic leader could break through the prevailing orthodoxy that the nation is permanently divided into red and blue states ... and build a broader sense of community, with a compelling new vision.”
There was only one problem. Obama wasn’t charismatic. He was glamorous -- powerfully, persuasively, seductively so. His glamour worked as well on Bennis and Zelleke as it did on voters.
What’s the difference? Charisma moves the audience to share a leader’s vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience’s mind.
Comments
I really enjoyed this, thank you. I know Postrel bugs some people the same way David Brooks does, in the things she does with pop culture and sociological/pyschological topics. But I think when Postrel is good, she is very very good and I admire her writing skill, a major part is about the writing skills. It's like either she thinks about the topic for a very very long time before putting pen to paper (or nowadays, fingers to keyboard) and the perfect words flow, or she edits forever until it appears the words flow, in the end making the perfect case for her view of things.
With this essay, it might irritate some that she choses the words glamourous and charismatic applies her own meanings and builds around that, but I see it as incredibly clarifying way to go about the differences between the Obama and Clinton personas, (especially intriguing even though both borrowed from JFK mythos.) It reads so easy, effortlessly, but there is a lot of there there.
What I mean by bringing a long term perspective and it being clarifying like these two graphs, where she brings in things from the past many might have forgotten, which apply to her current subject, and does it very succinctly:
by artappraiser on Mon, 07/16/2012 - 1:58pm