On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, shag wrote:
>> The reason they feel this at Obama rallies and not Clinton rallies is
>> that Obama's got charisma: the ability to say things in the right way
>> to get them to resonate in a crowd. And to play and build on that
>> resonance.
>
> but all the research on this shows that they feel it at clinton rallies,
> too.
Huh? People are just as excited by Clinton? Nobody's seems to be reporting that.
> i'm not really clear on what you mean by charisma, though. i know you're
> using it in the weberian sense
No, I'm not. I'm sorry, I thought that would be obvious. The Weberian sense as developed in Economy and Society mostly only applies to religious figures and warrior leaders.
And the sense developed in "Politics as a Vocation" isn't a sense at all INHO -- it's mostly incoherent, and where it isn't incoherent, it's wrong. (Don't get me wrong. There is good stuff in that essay. It just isn't the charisma part.)
The charisma I'm talking about is the more mundane sense -- it's the ability to stir a crowd, and in particular, to stir them to feel more certainty in their defining convictions. You know, the Elementary Forms of Religious Life effect :o) only with words instead of ritual, or with words as the ritual. The kind of thing generally attributed to Reagan and Martin Luther King.
My argument is Reagan had a huge effect in changing the political common sense of this country -- and his charisma was a major, if not the major, instrument by which he caused this. He convinced the country that government could do no good. A man with similar charisma might be able, over the course of 8 years, to convince the country of the opposite, which is what it believed for Reagan: that it is natural to expect government to fix the problems of education, pensions, health care and low wages -- that "yes we can."
He might not of course. He might fuck up in a million ways. But I don't think the "watered down charisma" you attribute to Reagan is anything to sniff at. We're still suffering its effects.
Michael