What's the Prob, Bob?
Unplugging from daily blogging is freeing yet — true of all freedoms? — unsettling. You climb up the big mountain range off past the edge of town, find a nook, and look down. There’s everyone, scurrying around in miniature. Turn your head 90 degrees, woop, now you’re gazing off at a vast vista, or the pillbugs and dust mites picking their way across the crannies of your cave. Turn your head back — there’s everyone again! A whole town, your town, only…you’re not in it. Is it really your town anymore? What are you, a rentier citizen? But surely relevance isn’t a lightswitch….
I mention this because it dovetails in a strange way with assessing Jindal’s non-speech reply to Obama’s non-SOTU speech.
A good number of folks who’ve been talking up Gov. Bobby Jindal’s presidential chances are now defending his anodyne performance last night by pointing out, correctly, that Jindal is smart, serious and talented, and that there’s no evidence that a panned SOTU (or budget speech) response will make or break a career. […] They’re just too artificial — a man or woman, standing in an empty, artificially lit room, trying to tie several knots at once. Fine. Jindal’s buzz shouldn’t really go down much among Beltway insiders. As I noted yesterday, he is not charistmatic [sic], and this format is not his best. Formal speech responses are quaint in an era of instantaneous communication.
Whoa, what’s that maxim of Politics 3.0 doing in there? Ambinder does it again later, only with Politics 1.0:
Politicians use charisma — call it authentic presence — to cover up their human quirks. Luckily for Jindal, other WH 2012 or 2016 contenders […] aren’t terribly charismatic either, aside from Ex-MA Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has a tenuous relationship to certain parts of the Republican base. The good news for Jindal is that expectations have been lowered a bit, and if you believe him to be serious about not running until at least 2016, not a thing has happened to change his prospects.
This all sounds right to me except for maxim one, and maxim two is true but in a way that needs unpacking.
Jindal’s response was near-instantaneous, and if we mean ‘unprepared’, well, I assure you that if Jindal went with unprepared remarks his beltway assessment would not have improved. But as it stands, the main opportunity that Jindal ‘missed’ was to ‘go to the head of the class’ in the way Obama did with his debut address, which of course was an entirely different format, etc., etc. As much of a dud as Jindal was, and as correctly as Ambinder points out that the ‘party response’ format is lame and flatfooted (though not because of the internet), it’s outrageous to expect Obamaness out of Jindal, and it’s troubling, though not surprising, to see that the GOP nervously desires Obamaness out of him.
There is only one Barack Obama, and imitating him will do great harm to American politics because it will lodge all the deeper our stupid conviction that ‘authentic presence’ of various kinds can be rubbed off, or sprayed on. Such a creepy covetousness of power-emanating totem-people it spawns. Obama’s charisma is contagious: what an intoxicating promise! But reminding ourselves that we can never truly separate a person from their ‘-ness’ should actually bring Obama back down to Earth, reminding us that Obama is only human. Alas, in the charisma game, we remain dangerously uneducated about what ‘authentic presence’ really means, paying great lip service to ‘authenticity’ while fawning over mere ‘presence’, stage presence. Authenticity is a fax of a fax, a ghost of a ghost. You can’t be merely authentic. You have to be an authentic something. “Yeah,” answers our cheap, corrupted vision of charisma. “Authentically present!”
Austin Powers: Hey! There you are!
Tourist: Hi… do I know you?
Austin Powers: No, but that’s where you are! You’re there!
‘Charismatic politicians’, as we understand them, use their ability to be ‘authentically present’ to pin you to a moment in which details and realities outside that moment are rendered irrelevant. (Here I am! No, you don’t know me. But this is where I am! I’m here!) Jay Gatsby has this talent. So do Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton. So does (apparently) Rupert Everett:
He has the ability to intoxicate effortlessly, gazing deep into your eyes and listening acutely, no matter the topic. Spending time with him is like encountering your sixth-grade crush all grown up — instantly intimate in a way that’s both entirely silly and completely satisfying. No matter that he’s had only one bona-fide Hollywood hit. He is a star, which means everyone else in the world, journalists included, are fans. That he stops thinking about you the moment you’re out of sight is a given.
He attributes this same magnetic star power to Madonna. In his autobiography, he writes, “but when she looked away, it was like sunbathing on a cold day and suddenly a cloud comes.”
Make that incompletely satisfying. Calling Bobby Jindal uncharismatic in this way is almost to pay him a compliment. We need fewer, not more, such people in politics. We like to give them things, you see, and when we snap out of it, later…ugh.
Jindal’s lack of stage presence may have made his moment in the sun clunky and offputting, but on what planet does anyone want a ‘party response’ spot to send a thrill up their leg? ‘Obamaness’ is a fatal charm and zahir for the GOP, an El Dorado for intellectual check-kiters. In town, Jindal looked all-too-human. Off on the mountaintop, this is a relief. But from afar, our gazes aren’t trained on our towns. They’re trained on the City of Gold, on Homer’s version of Chocolate City, on a hypnotic mirage. It’s easy, so intoxicated, to trudge on in defiance of one’s dwindling rations. But, yes — from up on the mountaintop? Even up here? Your bones are showing.
“an El Dorado for intellectual check-kiters.”
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this, but you have a wonder way with word, James!
— Tony Comstock · Feb 26, 04:58 PM · #
This is an odd post. I’ll agree that charisma can blind people in politics, but being successful in politics requires it. One needs to be able to rally the people, to persuade, to take to the bully pulpit. Politics is, of course, a separate concern from governing, which requires different skills. Perhaps Jindal is okay at governing, but if his communication skills aren’t strong he’s not going to move up, and having seen him on television several times now I can tell you that he’s alright, but nothing special on that front. The response was worse than his usual, but not incredibly worse.
This post actually sounds a lot like Democratic whingeing over the past few election cycles about how the media focused too much on charisma and personality instead of Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s respective qualifications and issue positions. It’s easier to just try to find better candidates instead of decrying the system for chewing up people like Jindal and Sarah Palin, capable local politicians who clearly lack the chops to be plausible national figures.
— Lev · Feb 26, 05:49 PM · #
Lev: If people stopped believing that charisma is good, even that campaigning successfully means that one will govern successfully, then perhaps they would resist rather than embrace its seduction. If James can help convince them of this, then good for him.
— Aaron · Feb 26, 06:49 PM · #
Hmmm…I’m not so sure the GOP wants “Obamaness” in their future candidate, but surely it’s wise to want some form of charisma, some oratorical skill in your candidate when he/she has to go up against Obama? And surely the criticism of Jindal’s awful speech is justified on its own merits (or lack thereof) regardless of any missing “Obamaness.” The speech was bad and uninspiring, and would have been just as bad and uninspiring if it were a response to Al Gore.
— E.D. Kain · Feb 26, 07:51 PM · #
“Lev: If people stopped believing that charisma is good, even that campaigning successfully means that one will govern successfully, then perhaps they would resist rather than embrace its seduction. If James can help convince them of this, then good for him.”
And no more A-list mean girl cliques in high school anymore either! Oh hooray! Godspeed James!
— Tony Comstock · Feb 26, 08:05 PM · #
too many years, too many problems, too many people all acting like this is the first time the conservative party has been shoveled to the rear, come on folks wake up and smell this years coffee I,m running for president in 2012 on a platform of waste and spending. the idea is there is to many old incoerent senators and congressmen wasting our money and our time. P.S. you will not have to pay me to clear house, look for me everywhere in 2011.
— greyghost · Feb 26, 08:10 PM · #
I don’t know, Tony. If someone is so charismatic that we don’t even realize he is charismatic, there is of course nothing to be done. But if someone is only charismatic enough to make us say, “wow, he sure is charismatic,” we have the choice whether or not to be taken in, and our attitudes really have changed over time, if “The Rhetorical Presidency” and other such works can be believed.
But you’re probably right, the ship has left the station, and I would not seriously suggest that James Poulos has sufficient charisma to turn the unfortunate situation around.
— Aaron · Feb 27, 12:35 AM · #
Saying that Obama is JUST charismatic was the essence of a big chunk of McCain’s campaign strategy as in the ad where he compared Obama to Paris Hilton. That strategy was less about turning people against Obama than it was a weak attempt to deny how fucked the GOP was.
Now you are doing the same thing, trying to spin Jindal’s disaterous peformance. But it’s just more weak denial. No one is going to turn the US over to someone who is so socially inept that they address the nation as if they were talking to a preschool class about eating vegetables. And Obama is charismatic, but he is way more than just charismatic. He is (most likely, anything is possible in this crisis environment) going to totally kick the GOPs ass for eight years and transform the US into a conservative’s nightmare with single payer health care and re-regulated banks and…. fill in the blank.
The funny thing is, the GOP is to a very large extent responsible for the crisis which is giving Obama the opportunity to remake the country to a degree that the GOP was dreaming about back when they were planning the permanant republican majority. It would fit the definition of classical tradgedy if the GOP weren’t so completely retarded on every level. Stupidity is not a tragic flaw.
— cw · Feb 27, 03:11 AM · #