[wordup] It's the Charisma, Stupid

[Adam Shand]

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From: http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html

It's the Charisma, Stupid
November 2004

Occam's razor says that we should prefer the simpler of two 
explanations. I begin by reminding readers of this principle because 
I'm about to propose a theory that will offend both liberals and 
conservatives. But Occam's razor means, in effect, that if you want to 
disagree with it, you have a hell of a coincidence to explain.

The theory is that, in US presidential elections, the more charismatic 
candidate wins.

People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have 
a consistent bias: they take politics seriously. When one candidate 
beats another they go looking for political explanations. The country 
is shifting to the left, or the right. And that sort of shift can 
certainly be the result of a presidential election, which makes it easy 
to believe it was the cause.

But when I think about why I voted for Clinton over the first George 
Bush, it was not because I was shifting to the left. Clinton just 
seemed much more dynamic. He seemed to want the job more. Bush seemed 
old and tired. I suspect it was the same for a lot of voters.

Clinton didn't represent any national shift leftward. [1] He was just 
more charismatic than George Bush or (God help us) Bob Dole. In 2000 we 
got practically a controlled experiment to prove it: Gore had Clinton's 
policies, but not his charisma, and he suffered proportionally. Same 
story in 2004. Kerry was smarter and more articulate than Bush, but 
rather a stiff. And Kerry lost.

As I went back through elections, I couldn't find one where the more 
charismatic candidate lost. Pundits said Carter beat Ford because the 
country distrusted the Republicans after Watergate. And yet it also 
happened that Carter was famous for his big grin and folksy ways, and 
Ford for being a boring klutz. Four years later, pundits said the 
country had lurched to the right. But Reagan, a former actor, also 
happened to be even more charismatic than Carter (whose grin was 
somewhat less cheery after four stressful years in office). And the 
charisma gap between Reagan and Mondale was like that between Clinton 
and Dole, with similar results. The first George Bush managed to win in 
1988, though he would later be vanquished by one of the most 
charismatic presidents ever, because the first time around he was up 
against the notoriously uncharismatic Michael Dukakis.

These are the elections I remember personally. Histories describe Nixon 
as more charismatic than Hubert Humphrey or George McGovern (which 
apparently was not difficult). In the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson 
seems to have been invested with some of the charisma of the martyred 
Kennedy; he certainly started acting like Kennedy once he became 
president, to a degree that must have astonished his old-school 
colleagues in the Senate. [2]

I don't propose that the charisma rule holds for all of American 
history. It may not apply to elections before television became 
widespread. The most recent counterexample may be the election of 1960, 
which took place just as TV was becoming the default news medium. It is 
still debated whether Kennedy would have won in 1960 without fraud by 
party machines in Illinois and Texas, but for our purposes it's enough 
of a counterexample that the election was even close.

In every election since 1960, however, the more charismatic candidate 
has won.

The charisma theory may also explain why Democrats tend to lose 
presidential elections. The core of the Democrats' ideology seems to be 
a belief in government. Perhaps this tends to attract people who are 
earnest, but dull.  Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry were so similar in that 
respect that they might have been brothers. Good thing for the 
Democrats that their screen lets through an occasional Clinton, even if 
some scandal results. [3]

  One would like to believe elections are won and lost on issues, if 
only fake ones like Willie Horton. And yet, if they are, we have a 
remarkable coincidence to explain. In every presidential election since 
TV became widespread, the more charismatic candidate has won. 
Surprising, isn't it, that voters' opinions on the issues have lined up 
with charisma for 11 elections in a row?

I'm not saying that issues don't matter. Of course they do. But the 
major parties know so well which issues matter how much to how many 
voters, and adjust their message so precisely in response, that they 
tend to split the difference on the issues, leaving the election to be 
decided by the one factor they can't control: charisma.

During the 1992 election, the Clinton campaign staff had a big sign in 
their office saying "It's the economy, stupid." Perhaps it was even 
simpler than they thought.

Notes

[1] As Clinton himself discovered to his surprise when, in one of his 
first acts as president, he tried to shift the military leftward. After 
a bruising fight he escaped with a face-saving compromise.

[2] If the Democrats are wondering where they went off the rails and 
started to be identified with the liberal elite, it seems to me it 
happened when Lyndon Johnson, conservative southern Democrat if there 
ever was one, had a kind of political mid-life crisis in the mid 1960s. 
Not that it matters, of course; give the voters another Clinton, and no 
one will mind if his party is that of the liberal elite.

[3] One implication of this theory is that parties shouldn't be too 
quick to reject candidates with skeletons in their closets. Charismatic 
candidates will tend to have more skeletons than squeaky clean 
dullards, but in practice that doesn't seem to lose elections.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Maria Daniels, Jessica Livingston, and 
Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.