Likability in America
Whose big idea was “likability,” anyway? Historian Claire Potter says it was a guy thing.
As Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and others jumped into the race, each seemed to affirm the new power of women in 2019, a power that was born when President Trump was sworn into office, exploded during #MeToo and came into its own during the 2018 midterms.
But no female candidate has yet led the polls. The men keep joining — Michael Bennet this week, Joe Biden the last — and keep garnering glowing press coverage. Although Mr. Biden fumbled two previous presidential bids, we are told he has “crossover appeal”; Bernie Sanders has been admired by this newspaper as “immune to intimidation”; and Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay man nominated for president, is “very authentic.” By contrast Ms. Harris is “hard to define”; Ms. Klobuchar is “mean”; and Ms. Warren is a “wonky professor” who — you guessed it — is “not likable enough.” Seeing comments like this, Mrs. Clinton said wryly in January, “really takes me back.”
It turns out women just aren’t likable. God knows everyone has tried – tried and tried and tried – but it’s hopeless. Women always have something wrong with them. You can’t always quite specify what it is, but you know you don’t like her.
As presidential candidates put advertising experts in charge of national campaigns, perhaps it was inevitable that likability would jump explicitly to politics. In 1952, some of the first televised election ads sought to highlight Dwight Eisenhower’s likability. The advertising executive Rosser Reeves put Eisenhower in controlled settings where his optimism, self-confidence, humor and nonpartisanship could be emphasized over his political inexperience and what Reeves viewed as his “inept” speaking style.
So he doesn’t know jack shit about governing, so what, he’s called Ike, he’s likable!
Yet if the history of likability in America tells us how important it has become, particularly to politics, it also teaches us there is nothing immutable about a concept that was created and refined by men from Horatio Alger to Dale Carnegie to Roger Ailes. Women haven’t benefited much from the likability standard as it stands. But to recognize that it’s an invention is to dream that they could.
What would it mean if we could reinvent what it is that makes a candidate “likable”? What if women no longer tried to fit a standard that was never meant for them and instead, we focused on redefining what likability might look like: not someone you want to get a beer with, but, say, someone you can trust to do the work?
The overwhelming success of female candidates in the 2018 midterms is a sign that this might already be happening. It was, for many people, a turn to a new kind of member of Congress — female, of color — who could be trusted in the face of a White House that can’t seem to get its facts straight and a president who had proclaimed Washington to be a swamp only to put his boots on and wade right in. If Americans can learn to like and trust women in Congress in record numbers, maybe they can learn to trust women as presidential candidates too — and maybe even like them.
Well let’s not go crazy here.
I find Elizabeth Warren eminently likeable.
Michael Bennet got glowing press coverage? Maybe if you dug for it. He barely made a splash at all, way less than Harris and Warren when they announced. Probably less than Klobuchar, but in the same league.
As the article points out, women were found to be likable and won lots of elections in 2018. We’re focusing on 3 women here, which is a pretty small sample size. I know you bristle at being told they’re unlikable, but maybe they are.
I like Warren, but through a series of missteps she’s fumbled her way to seeming inauthentic (I really am Native American! Look, you’d like to have a beer with me — see I’m drinking beer with my husband on Instagram!).
Harris seems to go out of her way not to stake out positions and to backpedal when she accidentally does. Then there are stories like this:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kamala-harris-ag-office-tried-to-keep-inmates-locked-up-for-cheap-labor
Who’s going to like an advocate of that?
Klobuchar has barely made a dent. The article says she’s been called mean, which they imply is unfair, but if you click through the link, you get an article talking about anecdotal evidence she’s very hard on her staff, coupled with the statistic that she has very high staff turnover. So this isn’t out of thin air.
(And, honestly, we’re really only talking about 2 unlikable women, because hardly anybody’s noticed Klobuchar enough to have an opinion either way. It’s like complaining the John Delaney and Mike Gravel, 2 other candidates, aren’t seen as likable. You have to know someone to like them.)
And how disingenuous is it to imply Biden had a few failed campaigns so he shouldn’t be getting such attention? He was Obama’s VP for 8 years in the interim, and he’s led almost every poll. So the situation has changed quite a bit.
Let’s step back for a second and look at the big picture: We’re very early in this campaign, most people aren’t paying that much attention, and when asked the two top names are the VP of the last Democratic president and the guy who barely lost the last Democratic nomination. This is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. If Obama’s VP had been a woman, she’d almost certainly be at the top of the polls. And what happened to the person before Bernie who lost a heartbreakingly close Democratic nomination? That would Hillary Clinton in 2008. The next time she ran she topped the polls, right?
Harris and Warren have been sitting at 3 and 4 in most polls, so after the 2 almost automatic spots we have 2 women. That’s not that bad, especially at this point.
From here, who knows. Maybe Warren will find her footing again. Maybe Tulsi Gabbard or John Hickenlooper or someone yet to enter will catch everyone’s attention all of a sudden. Maybe Harris will stake out some positions and turn out to have a good explanation for not wanting to release those people from prison. Or maybe we’ll all decide that “mean boss” Amy Klobuchar is the fierce kind of person we need to take out Trump.
And not just in the uStates. We can do the same to our women in Oz.
One more to add to your reading lists :
https://www.amazon.com.au/Stalking-Julia-Gillard-brought-minister-ebook/dp/B00DMQ0BNK
This is the story of a woman who immigrated to Australia as a child, became a successful lawyer and finally Prime Minister. She was undermined at every turn, not by opposing political parties, but by those within her own party. It was a horrid, messy time, a time when what was left of The Left squandered their opportunities to flatter male egos.
Never has a prime minister been so assiduously stalked. Cast as a political liar and policy charlatan, Julia Gillard was also mercilessly and relentlessly lampooned for her hair, clothes, accent, her arse, even the way she walks and talks. Rudd, on the other hand, could barely do any wrong. His antics were afforded benign, unquestioning prime-time media coverage.
And the saddest part? She was eminently likeable, sensible, and a good leader, just the wrong sex.
And, once again, Skeletor has to explain to all of us how it really is.
Thank god Skeletor has all the inside information.
Honestly, I think Joe Biden will choke. He is a horrible campaigner, regardless of what he would be like as a president and I think it is a serious Achilles heel. And I really hope it’s not Sanders, because two shouty red-faced white guys on stage is a real turn-off. But he isn’t a great debater, as he showed against Hilary Clinton in the 2016 campaign (and with all due respect to Clinton, but she wasn’t the greatest debater either but she knocked Sanders and Donald Trump to the curb).
I like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and have given to both. I’ve also been dismayed at how little attention Julian Castro has gotten, and even Cory Booker, who never saw a camera he didn’t like. Clearly, the women and the men of color have struggled to get traction because the media is entirely uninterested in them. Why does Pete Buttigieg get all the cooing coverage when Warren puts out a good, well thought out policy every day? Why are we listening to Sanders haranguing when we could be paying attention to Harris’s tweets on problems and solutions?
It’s a mystery. :-P
Hmm. Warren erroneously relied on her family’s version of her family’s history, and extensive investigations by the media have shown that she received no advantage from this. But Skeletor thinks she’s inauthentic because she drank a beer on a campaign video, and Xenu knows that no political candidate ever has consumed a local food delicacy or beverage for political purposes.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden showed up at a “beer summit” even though he doesn’t drink, stole a British politician’s speech, and once got into a heated argument with a voter in which re repeatedly lied about his academic record in an attempt to prove that his “IQ” was higher than the voter’s. But he’s likeable, authentic, Uncle Joe, and Skeletor assures us that this is the objective truth and not the result of sexism because… well… because Skeletor would know if it were.
(Note: all of Biden’s worst moments would be just a normal day’s work for Trump. If Biden becomes the nominee, I will grumble and sigh but move on.)
To clarify: I don’t object to Biden showing up at a beer summit. Non-drinkers should be welcome to participate in social or political events that involve alcohol. I’m just saying, don’t ding Warren as “inauthentic” for doing an utterly ordinary thing like have a beer (is Skeletor’s claim that Warren doesn’t actually drink beer in real life? Like, presumably, as a Harvard professor she must only drink fine wine or the occasional glass of sherry with an extended pinkie finger?) when Biden drank fake beer….
Furthermore, on Biden – I’ve been reading George Packer’s The Unwinding, specifically the parts about a guy who worked for Biden for four years and then later I think for one of his campaigns – and the reality is that in private Biden is a shit. Rude, demanding, indifferent, insulting; a Trumpishly mean bastard.
Who the fuck is Michael Bennet? Pretending some rando no one’s ever heard of matters in the context of likeability is absurd to the extreme.
As a side note I don’t think Claire Potter is wrong to mention it; it’s just dumb that such an unknown should be getting that kind of attention.