Two Thoughts on the 'Cling' Thing

1)It's ironic to hear Hillary Clinton painting Barack Obama as the elitist successor to John Kerry and Al Gore. Ever since this election cycle got going, I've been saying that picking Hillary would be making the same mistake three times in a row -- putting up a candidate with no charisma in a race that's all about personality.

Charisma is the X-factor in politics, and especially presidential politics. All is forgiven to he who has it. Did Kerry and Gore really come off as such terrible elitists? Or did the "elitism" label stick because we didn't like them enough to bat it away? The latter, I think. Remember, elitism wasn't even the dominant meme in either of those contests. With Gore, it was dishonesty (I know, it seems hard to believe at this remove), and with Kerry it was flip-flopping. In each case, anything the Republicans threw at him stuck. Obama has already shown he has the kind of charisma that turns attacks into sympathy.

2)Commentators from Mickey Kaus to Paul Krugman have tried to show how Obama's speech about how "bitter" small-town voters "cling" to God, guns and xenophobia was logically incoherent. And maybe it was, as formulated, but there was a powerful thread somewhere in there about how bad leaders use hot-button issues to distract an angry populace. Think of the Middle East by way of analogy. No one thinks repression in Iran and Egypt is responsible for pro-Palestinian sentiment; but leaders in both countries successfully channel their citizens' anger into hatred of Israel, convincing them to focus on the Zionist threat instead of the regime holding them down. So it is with abortion, gay marriage, gun control, etc. in small-town America. They help leaders with otherwise losing policies maintain a grip on power.