Carter started getting favorable press when he started quoting Bob Dylan at the University of Georgia School of Law on May 4, 1974. The best person who was an outsider was going to win the Democratic nomination, and obviously, the general election ( because post-Nixon).
http://www.openculture.com/2012/07/hunter_s_thompson_remembe...
I'm not a historian of US politics, but it strikes me that Goldwater may have just had a lot of terrible opinions and policies.
Goldwater still carried 38% of the popular vote.
And Johnson was unable to prosecute the advantage of that momentum inherited from Kennedy. It was a very turbulent time.
Objectively, he passed the Civil Rights Act and, after the election vs Goldwater, passed the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, reformed Social Security, etc. Not sure how much more prosecution you could ask for.
And, perhaps you meant "inherited from Kennedy's murder", because in truth there was no legislative momentum under Kennedy. Kennedy may have introduced the Civil Rights legislation but Johnson passed it.
Johnson's complicated - Robert Caro has made him his life's work. I wont do it justice here.
Ford may have pardoned Nixon, but his handling of the SS Mayaguez incident more than made up for it.
Carter did actually seem less embarrassing as a leader because of his southern charm combined with the fact he hadn't "fallen and I can't get up".
And yeah, Reagan won because of his charisma. Hands down. Yeah, I remember "America held hostage -- day n" -- but I also remember the Camp David Accords. What did Carter in, IMO, was his malaise/crisis of confidence speech.
Though to be fair, he was 100% correct.
More importantly, I met President Reagan and though I was against almost everything about the man, he 100% won me over with a 90 second conversation and some candy. Idealistically I still disagree with almost everything Reagan while at the same time can't help but smile whenever I think of him.
I've read that a lot about politicians, artists etc, usually with hack journalists describing their magnetic personality, intensive eyes, some hold they have on people, etc.
And while for some it undoubtedly true, I can't help but wonder if it doesn't in most cases just reverse cause and effect. That is, we are indeed captivated by the person, but mostly because we already know that they're famous and we should be.
(As an added empirical observation, this also happens with famous people we meet that we otherwise could not care less about, and never thought of their looks as charming or their presence as charismatic. It's mostly a sort of "wow, my friends won't believe who I met today" thing).
A similar observation can be made for "good looks". There are people on the street, in clubs etc, that are 5 times as good looking as some artist in some "sexiest people of the year" list -- including artists downright ugly or average, which people still obsess over and find good looking.
This was different.
This was just a guy who seemed to have zero privacy and who lowered his voice conspiratorially and tried to have as private a conversation as was possible given the circumstances. And who zeroed in on what I most needed to have addressed.
It may have been fake. But if someone can fake sincerity that well, it's no wonder that they rise to a position of such power.
But certainly, both the halo effect and the cheerleader effect must always be factored in.
Most of us can tell that a basketball player jumped higher than the other players. Hardly any of us can see all the steps (literally) that went right to create the perfect jump.
pg focuses on how Bill Clinton worked a crowd. But one-on-one was where he really shone.
Clinton, a tall, attractive, invariably smiling, and politically powerful white male, will already elicit a kind of unconscious deference.
But he used that power aura to focus completely on one person at a time, with the kind of intensity and mirroring that most people can't even achieve with their spouses. Posture, eye contact, adjusting his facial expression and vocal volume to match the speaker. Then, apart from body language, he had an incredible ability to remember details about people, to appear to value their opinion highly, and to articulate their thoughts and beliefs, maybe better than they could.
This was said of him many times: that he could make anyone feel like they were the most important person in the world.
>He made deep eye contact with you. Once President Clinton’s eyes locked onto yours, they didn’t leave until the interaction was complete. In all my years of talking to celebrities, from sports icons and Hollywood starlets to business moguls and politicians, few have used this technique with such finesse. Most of these ego-monsters can’t hold the connection more than a few seconds before they start scanning the room for someone more important to talk to than the person right in front of them. Yuck!
> [...]
> Sometimes I affectionately refer to President Clinton’s gift of connecting to those who don’t like him as “the carwash phenomenon.” Dignitaries and their families — specifically the ones who were skeptical and unfriendly toward him — would enter the White House through the East Wing gates, often with expressions of disdain. They would take a tour of all the public areas and then work their way over to the president’s office in the West Wing, to meet with him. A few hours later, when they exited the White House through the West Wing gates, they looked completely different. It was as if President Clinton, like a cosmic car wash, had magically washed away their scowls and replaced them with expressions of pure relaxation. Absolutely remarkable!
http://www.philgerbyshak.com/connection-from-president-bill-...
(mentioned in Meacham's recent biography of H.W.)
Actually Ford looked clumsy because he fell down a lot...president clumsy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlz0he9rtKw
[Edit] On conscience: One can argue that it is worth taking a bath in year x for gains in year x + y; the Goldwater enthusiasts of 1964 thought that the debacle contributed to the election of Reagan in 1980, and may have been right.
On 2000: I still argue that Nader had more to do with the elections outcome than any imbalance in charisma.
[Edit 2: yes, I said Scalia...]
Al Gore and John Kerry... I'll give you those, and it's not surprising then that he wrote this article in 2004, but I think in other instances it's curve-fitting.