Should Presidents be Likeable?
By Ralph Keyes I don’t care for Al Gore. His manner is too pedantic, too patronizing, as if he’s addressing a class of sixth graders and is trying to speak very slowly and enunciate with great care to make sure they get what he’s trying to say. Nonetheless, Gore is my top choice for our next president. He is simply the most experienced of our potential chief executives, most thoughtful, and with a proven capacity for leadership. Does anyone doubt how much better off our country and our world would be if he’d been given the victory he won in 2000? I feel similarly about Hillary Clinton. She’s a hard person to warm to: secretive, over-disciplined, a bit severe. Yet Hillary is more qualified than any other declared Democrat to become our president. Although I warm more to Obama, I’d vote for Hillary in a heartbeat, and think she’d prove to be a capable chief executive.
Is this contradictory? Only if one puts likeability high on the presidential vita. And we do. With a head of government who doubles as chief of state, we want our presidents to be warm and fuzzy in the Ronald Reagan-Bill Clinton mode. Granted that the ability of such men to win audiences was key to their leadership skills, this is only one talent among many. I thought then and think now that Reagan’s mixed record has been given a historical gloss due to his likeability alone. The same thing is true of Bill Clinton. Had he been a better organized, more disciplined executive, mightn’t the country have been the beneficiary?
We’re nearing the end of two terms of a catastrophically mediocre president who was often said to be the man with whom you’d rather share a beer than either of his Democratic opponents. So what? We’re paying a very stiff price for voting on that basis. In the current Republican primaries, Mike Huckabee is attracting attention with his winning manner, as is Mitt Romney to a lesser extent. Might we again end up with an appealing president who isn’t up to the job?
In England, where the head of government is not the head of state, and is chosen by parliamentarians rather than elected at large, an unusually likeable man — Tony Blair — has just been succeeded by the more sober Gordon Brown. Brown’s flair (or lack thereof) can’t compare with that of his predecessor. Yet he seems a capable man, an effective leader, and one with a far better take on the Iraq situation than that of Tony Blair. Might we learn something from this example?
