John Henry Newman said that men go by their sympathies, not by argument. I used to think this off-putting and unfortunate because it often leads to deception and pain, but it is how God made us. Emotions are part of being human and so to be influenced by style - by externals such as voice or hair or looks - is what separates us from robots if not animals.
In the past I naively thought a president's role was primarily one of being a good decision-maker and of leading us down the right path, ethically and in terms of effectiveness. But now I'm beginning to see how few voters really believe this. Many people look to leaders for inspiration and maybe even love. Did George Washington's height and majesty play nearly as big a role as his abilities as a general?
FDR, patron saint of liberals, was probably a mediocre president at best but he had a voice made for radio (Amity Shlaes writes, "In the darkness, Roosevelt’s voice seemed to shine...his calls for courage, his Fireside Chats, all were intensely important"). From this New Yorker book review:
He had the good fortune to be “a great radio speaker born into the era of radio.” As an experimenter with the economy, however, he was capricious and vacillating. In his manipulations of gold and the gold standard, according to Shlaes, “FDR’s playfulness was at its most destructive.” This was no time for playfulness: “Focusing on the fun of experiments neglected the question of whether unceasing experimentation might frighten business into terrified inaction.” The plethora of ambitious programs and agencies perpetrated in the first hundred days of the New Deal seemed aimed more at creating a sensation of activity than at achieving feasible objectives: “Americans must know Washington was doing something. If there were contradictions between experiments and within them, well, that did not matter.”...More ominous was Roosevelt’s totalitarian tendency: “His remedies were on a greater scale and often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.”So apparently part of FDR's genius was to look busy and sound good. He rallied people through hard times simply by caring, whether genuine or not. That he arguably extended the hard times seems not to be the point.
I was amazed by how much credit George W. Bush got for his famous "bullhorn moment" just after 9/11. To me it was just style, a nice gesture, but it turns out that people demand style. They'll put up with incompetence if somebody has charisma, and so part of the reason for Bush's low poll numbers is that he neither looks nor sounds good. Like it or not, Clinton's "I feel your pain" combined with his articulateness works.
John Updike, author of the New Yorker piece, relays how this worked personally, how his father lashed out against business and embraced perceptions over reality (dashed with a pinch of desire for revenge):
My father had been reared a Republican, but he switched parties to vote for Roosevelt and never switched back. His memory of being abandoned by society and big business never left him and, for all his paternal kindness and humorousness, communicated itself to me, along with his preference for the political party that offered “the forgotten man” the better break. Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world.Mother Teresa was once criticized for not getting the dying to hospitals or not providing better medical care - for a lack of competence in earthly things even though she offered the dying something ultimately more valuable: love.
But with business v. government, isn't it more complicated? Can either "love" you? Doesn't it come down to individuals? Business is hardly merciless; I've seen examples of people being "carried" for reasons good or bad and there are plenty of small businesses and family businesses that don't fixate on profit. On the flip side, there's nothing more inhumane than going to the DMV...
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