Late on Tuesday night, after Hillary Clinton finally won a majority of pledged delegates in the Democratic primary, Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein published an essay titled “It’s time to admit Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarily talented politician.” As you might guess from the self-evident headline—anyone who clinches his or her party’s nomination for the most powerful office in the world is pretty much by definition an extraordinarily talented politician—Klein’s piece is a perplexing document. Klein muses that “there is something about Clinton that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement,” and mentions that “plenty of Americans hate her”; he makes these observations without once using the word “sexism” or “misogyny.” He suggests that “the reason no one has ever broken the glass ceiling in American politics is because it’s really fucking hard to break,” which comes close to a tautology. He claims that Clinton has prevailed because she’s taken “a more traditionally female approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and winning over allies” (how novel!) but he doesn’t explain why we should consider these tactics “less masculine” than anything else required by the symbolic leader of a major party.
In the middle of all the straw-man attacks, stating of the obvious, and unsupported claims, however, Klein makes a compelling point about the sexist double standards that dog Clinton. (It’s actually mostly someone else’s point, but Klein deserves credit for highlighting it.) Klein cites Rebecca Traister’s wonderful recent profile of Clinton in New York magazine, in which Traister writes,
If, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic, perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance. It’s worth asking to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait. Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men doing it?
Klein concurs with Traister’s gendered reading of the likeability gap between Trump and Clinton. “The quality we adore in presidential candidates—the ability to stand up and speak loudly, confidently, and fluently on topics you may know nothing about—is gendered,” Klein writes. When men do this, they draw rapt, impressed audiences. When women do it, they’re decried as phonies.
But is the ability to draw people in just by opening your mouth really charisma, or is it just magnetism? Klein, Traister, and many others use the terms interchangeably, but psychologists who study charisma define it by different standards. According to Ronald E. Riggio, who’s studied charisma for decades, the trait requires expressiveness (the ability to communicate spontaneously and authentically), sensitivity (the ability to listen well and correctly read people’s emotions), and control (the ability to modulate emotions and fit in with different groups of people).
By this standard, Donald Trump is not charismatic. (He is expressive, surely, but neither sensitive nor controlled.) Neither are most American politicians in recent memory: Barack Obama is an extraordinary communicator and a bastion of control, but he’s more of a talker than a listener, more matter-of-fact than emotionally tuned in (although he can be amazing with children). Ted Cruz’s powers of expression have earned him comparisons to extraterrestrials, thanks to “the canned absolutist lines; the just-add-water outrage machine; the too-loud, too-much quality that thrums through every venue until your face hurts” (in my colleague Dahlia Lithwick’s words). George W. Bush had an unusual facility with nonverbal communication—recall the way he intuitively slung his arm around a firefighter at Ground Zero a few days after 9/11—but he could be as sensitive as a longhorn steer. (See: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”) Even Sarah Palin, often held up as an exemplar of charisma, lacks the sensitivity and control required to fine-tune her personality and her approach for different groups of people. One exception in the parade of charisma-less American politicians is Bill Clinton, who possessed all three ingredients, so much so that he could get away with saying that he felt other people’s pain.
Ironically, Traister’s profile suggests that Hillary, too, is charismatic when she meets with constituents and supporters one-on-one. Describing a meeting with the Wheeler family, who lost their son Benjamin in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Traister illustrates a woman who is not only empathetic but also capable of pitching her message in the exact right tenor.
She is practically swelling, Hulk-like, with her desire to describe to this family how she’s going to solve the problem of gun violence, even though it is clear that their real problem—the absence of their middle child—is unsolvable. When Matty grabs the front of his diaper, Clinton laughs, suggesting that he either needs a change or is pretending to be a baseball player. She is warm, present, engaged, but not sappy. For Clinton, the highest act of emotional respect is perhaps to find something to do, not just something to say. “I’m going to do everything I can,” she tells Wheeler. “Everything I can.”
So if most politicians aren’t charismatic, and Hillary actually is charismatic, then what is the quality that Hillary lacks yet Trump carries in spades? (Apart from a Y chromosome, I mean.) I think when people call Trump—or Palin, or even Bush—charismatic, what they really mean is that they’re entertaining. You never know what they’re going to say next, or how they’re going to say it. They’re exciting to watch, whether you relish or condemn every word that comes out of their mouths. Hillary certainly doesn’t have much entertainment value. After decades in the national spotlight, she’s composed and predictable in front of crowds, and she knows that the media will pounce on any misstep. And yes, there’s a gendered element to entertainment value: Palin was dismissed as an unserious airhead for saying things that weren’t as offensive and senseless as what Trump says on a daily basis. But it should be comforting to Democrats—and anyone else who shudders to think of a Trump presidency—that Hillary’s biggest personal weakness isn’t that she can’t connect with people (she can), but that she’s not a ton of fun to watch. After all, the former trait is crucial in the White House, but the latter is not.
