Thread:Comments:United States re-elects Barack Obama/A truly terrible day, IMO./reply (9)

It's good we're clear we're talking about opinions. I too, btw, have been watching US politics for some years. (My first discernible political memory is of a guy with lots of teeth saying "hah. ahm Jimmi kahtah an ah wahnah be yaw nex presiden."  Or something close to that.)

To be clear, I do not claim the likeability theory is "wrong". My position is one of skepticism; I suspect it may be less significant than it is traditionally made out to be &mdash; and I also suspect it has a more-complicated-than-suspected relationship with what seems the real question: not, how important are superficial factors, but how important are substantive factors. The catch is that these superficial and substantive factors are not necessarily mutually independent. Both generally and in the case of the current election. Truth to tell, my sense about the current election is that it was heavily influenced by actual ideologies. It seems to me there can &mdash;generally&mdash; often be a highly complex, but nonetheless quite potent, correlation between the acceptability of an ideology to a society, and the effective "charisma" of a person advocating that ideology. I say "highly complex" because I can easily spot two routes by which the ideology affects the charisma, and I sense there are other routes and that, in fact, the various routes aren't even discrete, but flow into each other in a more analog sort of way. One: people have a favorable impression of someone who is saying things they agree with. Two: ideologies attract &mdash;select&mdash; the people who will tend to advocate them, and incompatible ideologies tend to attract people who won't get along with each other. In this particular election, there's also another factor: I suspect (without being certain) that Romney doesn't have deeply held beliefs about the issues of the day; and that is unattractive to people who believe in something, no matter what they believe in.