It may be that television and the ever more aggressive investigative efforts of the news media have addled our ability to choose a leader wisely. Between sound bites and the seduction of images, we run a popularity contest every four years instead of an election.
Would Abraham Lincoln have a chance today? He was ugly. We like photogenic leaders. We want leaders who appear to be flawless in past and present, which limits the intelligence, curiosity and experience of our winning candidates. We prefer someone shallow to someone of wide and deep experience.
We have disqualified candidates for president and vice president because they wept. Apparently an inability to feel something deeply is required for high office. Thomas Eagleton was bumped out of contention for vice president because he had been smart enough to seek help when he needed it. Apparently we prefer untreated problems in our candidates. We respond to candidates as we have become accustomed to responding to celebrities: Would we like them, do we find them attractive, can we identify with the character they project on the screen?
We often appear more interested in the sexual adventures -- or the lack of them -- of our heroes than in their political positions, which would have cost Thomas Jefferson the presidency, as well as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Martin Luther King Jr. could not have led the civil rights movement if his affairs had been held against him. Sexual peccadilloes do not cost lives or wreck the economy.
Great leaders have always been flawed. Would Moses make it in sound bites? He stammered. He also was a felon and a fugitive. FDR had a severe disability.
Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis looked like Rocky Squirrel in a tank. We seem to believe that looking good in a military pose is more important than having a grasp of what war actually involves to the invading country and the invaded.
A sense of history would have helped immensely before we took on Iraq, but we are trained to mistrust men of ideas and obvious education. Our leaders should not appear to be smarter than we are.
The worst thing that a politician can be called is elitist -- and what do we mean by that? In Iowa, Howard Dean was labeled that -- a sushi-eating, PBS-watching, Volvo-driving man; not macho enough to win the vote of working men.
