I really enjoyed this, thank

artappraiser — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 17:58:46 +0000

In reply to Obama’s Glamour Can’t Fix His Charisma Deficit: Virginia Postrel

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:

That was certainly true of Obama as a candidate. He attracted supporters who not only disagreed with his stated positions but, what is much rarer, believed that he did, too. On issues such as same-sex marriage and free trade, the supporters projected their own views onto him and assumed he was just saying what other, less discerning voters wanted to hear.

Even well-informed observers couldn’t decide whether Obama was a full-blown leftist or a market-oriented centrist. “Barack has become a kind of human Rorschach test,” his friend Cassandra Butts told Rolling Stone early in the campaign. “People see in him what they want to see.”

dagblog - Comments for "Obama’s Glamour Can’t Fix His Charisma Deficit: Virginia Postrel"

I really enjoyed this, thank