#half-baked ideas and just musing aloud about things here tbh

[that-starlit-wanderer]

At some point "has a lot of charisma"/"guy I would want to have a beer with"/"person I find relatable and authentic" became a necessary qualification for election to the presidency in the US. Or at least it became necessary to have some of these things - people like George W. Bush and Joe Biden might not be "charismatic" in the way people normally use the term, but they both have (or at least acted as if they had) a sort of down-to-earth regular-guy persona.

There's a few weird things about it though.

First, it wasn't always true. This is (probably?) easily explained by TV and later technological developments. Maybe people just had very different standards in the 1970s, but to me Richard Nixon was not charismatic, was not "authentic and relatable," and was certainly not someone your average person would want to have a beer with. At any rate he wasn't elected for any of those reasons. But since Reagan in 1980, there has probably only been one president (George H.W. Bush) who clearly doesn't meet any of those criteria.

Second, as far as I can tell it really only applies to the presidential election. Presumably it's better to be charismatic than not if you're trying to win a seat in the House of Representatives or be elected the governor of Nevada or whatever, but it hardly seems like a qualification the way it is for the presidency. I'll bet most of the state governors in the US right now are probably pretty boring people!

Third, it feels like it's kind of a uniquely American thing, at least among "Western" countries. Emmanuel Macron was elected in France despite campaigning as literally the opposite of a relatable man-of-the-people type. Stephen Harper and (soon) Pierre Poilievre will be prime ministers of Canada in the 21st century despite having the charisma of soggy cardboard and barely trying to hide the fact that they've spent their entire lives in politics. Other than Boris Johnson and maybe Tony Blair in his early years UK prime ministers are almost always boring, not-very-charismatic people. Japanese prime ministers are usually very bland.

So there's something about US presidential elections in particular where voters just expect the person running to be entertaining, to be energetic, to have at least some baseline charisma, to be relatable and down-to-earth, in a way that no other country seems to expect and in a way that even American voters don't really seem to care about when it comes to down-ballot races.