An essay by Virginia Postrel. I’m pretty indifferent and immune to glamour and charisma, which is one of the reasons I saw through Obama right away, but many otherwise smart people obviously aren’t, so glamour is more important than many think.
11 thoughts on “The Meaning Of Glamour”
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Pfffh. What you have to remember is that Obama is “glamorous” only to a particular kind of policy wonk. Virginia Postrel is usually fairly reasonable but obviously falls into the category. Obama’s election had far more to do with affirmative action than with “glamour”.
The press wanted a Kennedy so they made a Kennedy.
I remember when the criticism was “he’s a celebrity, but what has he ever done?” We shouldn’t be hearing that one any more.
Sure we will, Jim, but now it will be exclaimed with exasperated irony: “OMG, Obama!? WTF have you done!? /facepalm”
Jim;
“Better to be thought a fool than to act and remove all doubt”
Jim’s right. Ages from now, when some future Gibbon writes THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE UNITED STATES, “il Dufe” will have his own chapter: “THe Man Who Turned the USA Into a Socialist Banana Republic.”
I remember when the criticism was “he’s a celebrity, but what has he ever done?” We shouldn’t be hearing that one any more.
Something we can agree on.
Jim, you’ve got a little bit of Kool-Aid dribble on your chin…
No Cecil, I think he just blew a seal.
As Ogden Nash put it:
It’s always tempting to impute
Unlikely virtues to the cute
The self-proclaimed intellectuals love to fall all over themselves when they see a “glamorous” politician like JFK or Obama (even Bill Clinton, at least at first). They drool about how smart he is, his charisma, his style. The press crawls into bed with the “glamorous” candidate and looks the other way at obvious weaknesses and flaws. This just goes to how naive and ignorant these “intellectuals” really are.
Frankly, I’d rather we elect decidedly unglamorous presidents of the Nixon variety, the ones that no one – especially the press – fully trusts. I want the press especially to be digging into everything every president does looking for possible wrong-doing because frankly, they’re all snakes. A president is the country’s most successful politician so by definition he can’t be trusted, glamorous or not.