Laugh out loud political analysis

From Elizabeth Warren Had Charisma, and Then She Ran for President by Peter Beinart. It is amazing the arguments academics, journalists, and academic-journalists can come up with in order to explain away what is otherwise fairly obvious to any other observer.

Beinart is trying to figure out why the Warren campaign is failing to gain traction.

To me, the obvious arguments are:

A material proportion of Americans share William F. Buckley's perspective

I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

Not because Americans are anti-intellectual but because Americans are pragmatic.

Americans find it hard to get past the attempt early in her career to game the racial identity system by claiming Native American heritage. Americans are generally in favor of helping people up but are very mixed about affirmative action as a mechanism for doing so. But they are pretty universally opposed to 1) dishonest gaming of affirmative action and 2) people who, having been caught in deception, refuse to acknowledge it.

A sizable number of a much smaller portion of the public, basically policy junkies and economists, have strong feelings against her about the poor quality of her research and how that bad research was then used to support a predetermined but non sequitur public policy - universal healthcare. They don't like that the research was poorly done; that it reached incorrect conclusions and that it was used, despite its flaws, to bolster flawed policy.

Many Americans are viscerally repelled by the image of champaign liberals and few are so easily tarred with that brush as Warren.

Many Americans are very uncomfortable with insincerity. No, not the Native American issue again. Trying to be all things to all people. Sounding black when you are not. Drinking beer when you do not. Trying to do a millenial vibe when all you have at best is sober stiffness. Pandering and insincerity are hard hurdles to overcome.

Most Americans have a dismal view of lawyers and academics. Warren is an academic lawyer.

All those seem plausible explanations. But no. You'll be surprised to find from Beinart that the core problem is that she is a woman.

His opening paragraph is laughable. I mean I was laughing two sentences in.

Charisma comes from the Greek word for “divine gift,” and back in 2015, political commentators thought Elizabeth Warren had a lot of it. Vox called the senator from Massachusetts “a more charismatic campaigner than [Hillary] Clinton.” Roll Call said Clinton couldn’t “match Warren’s charisma, intensity or passion.”

OK, the foundation of his argument is that a couple of left leaning outlets thought she had charisma four years ago. That is not much of a spectrum to support his case.

The laughable claim is that she was a "more charismatic campaigner than [Hillary] Clinton.” Well, factually plausibly true except that that is a bar so low a field mouse could clear it.

Now that Warren is running for president, many journalists have decided the charisma is gone.

Actually, I am guessing they aren't deciding that it is gone. They are noticing that it was never there.

Beinart is struggling mightily.

In a recent story about Warren’s fundraising trouble, The New York Times suggested that she was suffering because Democrats’ “longstanding fascination with youthful charisma—along with its current, Trump-driven fixation on electability—can outweigh qualities like experience or policy expertise.”

Another double barreled claim without support.

These would be Democrats whose longstanding fascination with youthful charisma has made Bernie Sanders (77) and Joe Biden (76) their front running candidates by large margins. By Beinart's logic, Warren, at a youthful 69, ought to be streets ahead of those old fuddy duddies.

And experience? Well . . . She has been a practicing lawyer. She is an academic. She does high end legal consultations to Fortune 500 companies. She's been a senator. This is not to suggest that she isn't bright, gifted, and a hard worker. But that is a pretty refined and narrow range. No executive experience. No demonstrated experience negotiating and reaching compromise in a real world environment. No obvious budgeting or defense experience. And if policy experience is based on an at best mixed policy such as Obamacare or CFPB, then it is hard to see experience and policy as strong suits.

Having attempted, and failed, to shore up her apparent credibility, Beinart shuttles out the old reliable excuse for an ineffective female candidate.

What happened? Warren may be a victim of what scholars of women’s leadership call the “double bind”: For female candidates, it’s difficult to come across as competent and charismatic at the same time. To be considered charismatic, leaders must be both appealing and inspiring, both likable and visionary. Unfortunately for women who seek positions of power, they’re rarely perceived as possessing these characteristics while also being deemed competent to do the job.

Nonsense. Warren is no victim (and if you want to advance women quit casting them as victims) of a mythical ideological-academic concept of "double-bind." Warren is a bright and accomplished woman with some real accomplishments that are quite, narrow and selective. She has made some bad career decisions (trying to ride the affirmative action wave), and some of her research was overstretched and flawed.

Don't take any of that away from her by slotting her into some template victim role where you alleviate your frustration by imputing character flaws onto the electorate. Even in this election cycle, we have some women with real charisma such as Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Granted she has a freight load of baggage which prevented her from prevailing but no one is arguing that she lacks charisma. She has it in buckets and she failed for known reasons (hard left, scandals about personal finances, tax liens, etc.).

Warren does not now and never had wide appeal or anything recognizable as charisma. She is the George Bush I without the rectitude, consequential and successful public service, military service, commercial success, etc. He was a refined and effete man of the Eastern establishment who was also a good man. But he had no charisma.

I am pairing them because I have read of both of them that they are charming and affable in a personal setting. The national public stage is not a personal setting. If you do not have charisma then you need a solid portfolio of admirable and widely admired achievement. He did, she does not. It has nothing to do with a "double-bind."