25 February 2009

What is important in a leader is character!  Oh yeah?  That is certainly not the way it appears.

I was once told by someone I highly respected that charisma is important in a political leader because so much of the job is to convince - to sell.  He said it so I believe it, and I guess when you come right down to it there is a great deal of truth in that.

But I still lean toward character, and if charisma is rhetorical babbling of soaring platitudes and sweeping generalities, as it apparently is today more often than not, then I am uncomfortable with what appears to be voters' most important criteria.  The leaders I can think of who were/are capable of soaring rhetoric laced with confidence under girded by arrogance were/are Hitler, Mussolini and Hugo Chavez.  Is this what we are looking for in our leaders?  Perhaps it is: a leader who stirs confidence and makes us feel good (oh, and promises us what we want to hear, of course).  We, and certainly the media contributes mightily, love the demagogue; if Huey Long had not been killed would he have become president?

Is it that we have difficulty in judging character?  Or perhaps character makes us uncomfortable in these post-modern days.  Or is it that media-ists are taken by soaring rhetoric, which after all is their trade, and we believe what they tell us, through their own soaring rhetoric?  Do we even have the capability any more to get beyond charisma, rhetoric, confidence (yes, and arrogance) to assess character?  But then maybe the more appropriate question today is, what, to us today, is the meaning of character?

I know what I think, but I fear that it is not generally shared.  I fear we are still very much in danger of being sold down the river by snake oil salesmen who strut and preen and make us feel good.  That is not my definition of a good leader, and I am mystified as to where character fits into that description.