Appropriate that the thread was sitting here with zero comments. Or is this a Neb-type joke where it will reject any comment and always have 0?
Doesn't anyone here know how to play this game?
By a process of pure reason, I'm calling it for Warren.
Anyway, reason also dictates that we should let Minnesota take Iowa's place as an early primary state. The people are basically identical but Minnesota seems more alert.
7: Minnesotans are more likely to be Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns, while Iowans are Danes. And what is Denmark? Mostly a flat, swampy peninsula. That is, Florida. By transitivity, Iowa is the Florida of the Upper Midwest, and thus cannot be trusted.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords doesn't look so bad now
https://twitter.com/williamadler78/status/1224535168167415811
Guys I have a good idea, we should do a nationwide primary but on a smartphone app.
Also, Minnesota swapped their caucuses for primaries, thank god.
I could swear that before yesterday the whole internet was assuring us that the Iowa caucus wasn't really that important and everyone should chill out about it and now that the results are less than a day late coming in it's all a terrible disaster and fuck Iowa and fuck caucuses and fuck apps and fuck Democrats, etc.
I am confused about this.
But at least it's making Twitter so tedious that I'm likely to get a lot of work done today, so that's helpful.
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Fight locusts at border points, herders urge government|>
12: In a fragile democracy where, especially this year, the perceived competence and legitimacy of the electoral systems is absolutely vital, flubbing it when everyone is watching is a Major Fucking Fuckup. Big Fucking Deal. Whatever you want to call it. It's not just the Twitters being bratty.
Bloomberg is looking smart both for skipping Iowa and for spotting Biden's weakness in a timely fashion.
My calculation of the entrance polls:
Buttigieg and Sanders: 23%
Biden and Warren 16%
I don't have the data for the lower candidates. And I'm estimating one of the relevant Biden numbers, but it's a small number and I'm not off too much.
14: But this isn't the real electoral system, it's the charming artisanal system with the personal touch that makes Iowa so unique.
I'm sitting around in a green room right now, waiting to meet EW before a town hall.
I'll be sitting in the risers behind her on stage. I really hope I can avoid sneezing.
16: Personal touches like deciding delegates with...a coin toss.
https://mobile.twitter.com/johnpemble/status/1224520604323368962
Sometimes you just don't have a D12 handy.
14: I know this is what I'm supposed to be taking away here, but I'm just not seeing it (which could be entirely my own problem!). What happened in Iowa is not what's made the democracy fragile in general, the perceived competence and legitimacy of the electoral system is being questioned here primarily either in bad faith or for want of information, and the actual practical outcome, barring some new major development, is that the results will be reported a day late. It seems to me like the best response of well-meaning public opinion havers would be to wind down hysteria rather than crank it up, because hysteria is what enables the non-well-meaning to successfully promote disinformation to their advantage.
From way over here the incompetence and illegitimacy of your electoral system has appeared well-established for many years.
19: Whatever we replace the caucus with has to be sure to maintain this awful average-of-averages characteristic we Americans love so much.
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https://www.cfr.org/blog/when-election-interference-fails|>
25: Oh god you're right, where the hash sums the children and returns the delegate number for the winning party.
"Average of averages"? I'm not sure which of our many dysfunctions this is referring to.
I agree with Nate Silver that the 15% threshold is effectively a lot like ranked-choice voting, so it's decent in theory, pruning out smaller candidates and hopefully coming to a little more consensus. If it were implemented by people casting ballots with ranked choices, so actually accessible to everyone and a secret ballot rather than the school-gymnasium shitshow they do now, it wouldn't be so bad.
27: I was using average-of-averages as short hand of any sort of method of voting that involves an intermediate stage that has to be won to count for voting at the final stage, distorting the base vote total. FPTP legislatures can be considered the prototypical example of this, but most non-US legitimate democracies that still use FPTP try to ameliorate it by making constituencies as fair as possible. We instead exacerbate it, like in the electoral college or in Iowa's caucus (since there's quasi ranked-choice voting at the precinct level via the 15% threshold, and then again at the state level more than 15% of delegates must be won; that should produce different results than RCV with a threshold--or even better, STV--done at the state level).
* And it isn't original to me, but I can't remember who first used it to describe the electoral college. Searching isn't helping.
I find it annoying that the media has detailed poll information from actual entrance polls and declines to provide it. So I have spent a chunk of my morning defying our media overlords and finally found the goods via CBS, which doesn't actually give you the candidate breakdown, but gives you enough information that you can figure it out.
So here is authoritative entrance poll result for Iowa. (Rounded to tenths of a percent):
Buttigieg 22.7%
Sanders 22.5%
Warren 16.3%
Biden 16.0%
Klobuchar 12.9%
Yang 6.1%
Steyer 1.4%
No choice 1.4%
Bloomberg 0.0%
Gabbard 0.0%
The Bloomberg number makes me happy. Thank you.
Only 3 states* have caucuses this time, and I think it'll be zero in 2024. Good riddance. I enjoyed the one I went to in 1984, but the access problems are just not worth doing. A primary -- just like we do in 47 states -- would be fine. Put another way, the government should run the fucking elections, not private organizations staffed almost entirely with volunteers.
I do think there's value in continuing to have a process, rather than a single day national primary. Gives candidates and movements time to catch on, while a national system would over-reward front-runner status and fundraising prowess.
So, what I really want to talk about, though, is Biden. Let's assume that he suffers a mortal blow on Super Tuesday, exactly 4 weeks hence. Does he endorse anyone? Bloomberg? Pete? Warren? Sanders? Does the Sanders campaign hire Biden's now unemployed staff?
* Some territories have them too. Fine.
Someone on Twitter posted about door knocking illustrating how many husbands control their wives votes, and someone else replied with this article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/19/voter-intimidation-republicans-democrats-midterm-elections
I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, or the impact of caucuses on this kind of behavior (as opposed to private ballot).
Does he endorse anyone? Bloomberg? Pete? Warren? Sanders? Does the Sanders campaign hire Biden's now unemployed staff?
I bet Bloomberg or no one.
So me and some other volunteers were in the green room talking about whales, and then Elizabeth Warren burst through the door.
We got about 5 minutes with her before the event kicked off. She said, basically, that it looks like most of the delegates are split three ways between her, Bernie, and Pete, and then there is a big gap. She says that her strategy is to bring the party together. She's working on appealing to moderates, and she says that in the she can bring "most of" Bernie's people along as well. She had some good snark about questioning Bernie's ability to get Medicare for All through with 60 votes in the Senate - doing it her way only takes 50 votes.
And then we did selfies and she went on to do her rock star performance on stage. The audience was maybe about 350 people, which is pretty good for a Tuesday morning in our corner of NH. There were a lot of questions about immigration. She hit the wealth tax pretty hard, and talked about corruption and the filibuster. Not much about health care. There was a good story about her nearly burning down the house with a toaster oven, with the point that its a good thing that the government now regulates toaster ovens to keep them from starting fires and so they should also do that to banks. Then she danced to Aretha Franklin at the close, and did a bunch more selfies.
It was the morning after Iowa, I don't know where she gets the energy.
We're going to discover how halfway through the general when an expensive house near Porter Square in Cambridge has a meth lab explosion.
Not having to go back to Iowa would energize anyone.
Only 3 states* have caucuses this time
Yes, and one factor that hasn't gotten a lot of attention is that this is largely the result of the DNC's reforms to the primary process, which included a bunch of additional rules and standards for caucuses. These were intended partly to make them fairer and more democratic, but also to discourage states from having them at all. The jury's still out on the first objective, obviously, but they were hugely successful at the second and almost all states that used to use caucuses have switched to primaries this time (including Alaska). A handful of states and territories, most prominently Iowa, were so committed to the caucus process that they insisted on trying to jump through all the hoops, and that may well be part of why Iowa was such a disaster (though we won't know for sure until the other caucuses happen).
I agree with Nate Silver that the 15% threshold is effectively a lot like ranked-choice voting, so it's decent in theory, pruning out smaller candidates and hopefully coming to a little more consensus. If it were implemented by people casting ballots with ranked choices, so actually accessible to everyone and a secret ballot rather than the school-gymnasium shitshow they do now, it wouldn't be so bad.
Yes, and in fact our new party-run primary here uses RCV and was sold to some of the old-school Dem insiders who like caucuses as being caucus-like in that sense. Caucuses are weird in that they have some characteristics that are more democratic than regular elections in the process itself despite being very exclusionary and undemocratic at the front end.
I hadn't thought about primaries being more likely to adopt RCV than other settings. That's a great place for them to infiltrate public consciousness as a worthy alternative.
Yeah, it's a good opportunity for innovation because many of them are run by parties rather than states. This is problematic in other ways and I think it would be better if they were all state-run, but as long as we have this quirk of the system it's worth using to make some positive changes.
This says turnout may have been very low last night. That's so unexpected that I don't want to read much into it, but I can't think of anything that would portend doom more than an unenthused electorate.
Josh Marshall thinks low turnout isn't a big deal because people are more focused on the general. I hope he's right.
That doesn't really explain why turnout would have been higher in 2008.
32: I posted a short response to that on Twitter that is mildly blowing up (for me, 6 retweets and 165 likes so far constitutes "mildly blowing up"): https://twitter.com/DavidEDaveWall1/status/1224465940537982976
32/44: That was controversial the last time it was brought up around here. (And I definitely saw evidence of it when I worked the polls, and tried to prevent it when the logistics would allow.)
43: You youngsters don't remember 2008, but it was a time when the Democratic Party was almost certainly either going to produce a black man or a woman as a nominee. As quaint as it seems nowadays -- when we would settle for a mammalian nominee -- people were really excited about it at the time.
when we would settle for a mammalian nominee
A tolerably well trained African Grey Parrot ought to be able to defeat the incumbent.
41, 42 -- It's a really big deal for Sanders, I think. He wins, primary or general, by swamping the polls with people under 40 who haven't been voting much up to now. If he doesn't, then the whole theory of his electability is out the window: he'll keep a majority of the people his campaign staff is enthusiastically denouncing as corporate or establishment democrats, and gleefully telling that they'll have to bend the knee, but not all of them. And so he'll have to be replacing those folks and more to win. How are we supposed to buy that he can do that? By doing it in the primaries. Narrow pluralities of the existing electorate? That'll get people thinking it's 1972 all over again.
She said, basically, that it looks like most of the delegates are split three ways between her, Bernie, and Pete, and then there is a big gap.
They've certainly got consistent messaging - I just got a text starting "It's a tight 3-way race..."
Allegedly I was on CNN today, sitting behind Warren during the speech.
They've certainly got consistent messaging
Telling the plain truth is funny that way.
I can't tell whether anyone has updated the initial reports of low turnout since the results came out.
52: 62% of precincts are what's been published, 101k votes, so exactly in line with the link in 41. Sanders has not brought new people to these polls.
I think they should make Iowa give up being first in the presidential nomination process and that little part of the state that's on the wrong side of the Missouri where you buy gas before returning a rental car at the Omaha airport.
I did not know about Carter Lake and the avulsion. There was a Supreme Court case and everything! No wonder Iowa and Nebraska hate each other on the map of hate.
This niche squib does get the tone right if you happen to be familiar with the target.
It's not that big of a deal if it weren't for needing to return a rental car with a full tank.
Here's your Iowa democracy in action - a coin toss to determine who gets the last delegate out of this #IowaCaucus precinct after Buttigieg and Klobuchar tied. Buttigieg won. pic.twitter.com/1s4zTE0u96
— Anthony Zurcher (@awzurcher) February 4, 2020
That is literally the way that every functioning democracy* handles a tie. It is, as far as I can see, the only bit of this ludicrous corn-fed Entmoot that in any way resembles the procedures of a functioning democracy.
(*OK, some draw cards, high card wins. Same principle though.)
A winning tweet:
These conspiracy theories are killing me. The Iowa Caucus is run by old white volunteers. What's more likely, that they rigged the entire primary or they had trouble with an app?
https://twitter.com/DavidKlion/status/1224698303738253312
Yes! That is exactly what a conspiracy theory is!
You know what's a really crazy conspiracy theory? The idea that the American President and the entire leadership of his party are in the pocket of Moscow. Hare-brained, I tell you!
Ehh I posted about Trumps links to Russian organized crime here before the 2016 election. I used to reject conspiracy theories out of hand, but Epstein didn't kill himself after all.
Ludicrous corn-fed Entmoot indeed!
It is certainly amazing that people involved in Democratic politics would recognize an opportunity to create and sell an app, and have the connections to get their app favorable consideration. And then make the app not work, killing future sales, in order to, what, delay the Sanders victory party? Definitely next level thinking.
Klion and the whole 'bend the knee' brigade look to me to be a much bigger hindrance to Sen Sanders than anything the DNC is doing.
59: So, it appears until you investigate and discover that the coin used for the toss was sold to the Iowa Democratic Party came from a magic store, and the Iowa Democratic Party rep. that purchased the coin worked for Clinton in 2016 and Mayo Pete in 2020.
67: Maybe your brain is too small for these complex conspiracy theories.
68: Admiral Pierre-Charles-Jean-Baptiste-Silvestre de Villeneuve didn't kill himself after all.
It occurs to me that the idea behind a deliberately flawed tabulation app might be to sabotage the caucus as a process. The idea here being if you're stuck with Iowa as "First in the Nation", and the process of caucuses are a bit to transparent to rig, then let's embarrass Iowa nationally with a big fail. I await the punditry choir calling for abandoning caucuses in favor of a traditional vote.
70 If you haven't been seeing exactly that, you're really not paying any attention at all.
Also, c'mon, listen to yourself. Deliberately flawed app to take down the Iowa caucus for 2024?
Related, I tried to calculate a metric of Iowa-embarrassment for Bloomberg, how much he spent per first-round votes he received (157, 0.1%), but when I searched "Bloomberg spending in Iowa" I found a weird blanketing of basically the same article under different bylines from WSJ, NYT, AP, and elsewhere on how the Iowa results were actually good for him and he's now doubling his ad spending showing his amazing strength.
There does seem to be a developing conventional wisdom that Biden's apparent weakness in Iowa means Bloomberg is now a serious contender. I'm skeptical.
OK, maybe he wasn't firehosing Iowa with money; these articles say he was always going to be trying to skip the early states, and I found one from before the caucus saying the same. Still, it should be embarrassing.
Oh yeah, he's always been clear that his strategy was to skip the early states and focus his ad spending on the Super Tuesday states.
Bloomberg had a dumb strategy, but post-Iowa it looks somewhat less dumb. He anticipated Biden's weakness as the Great Centrist Hope, and he discounted the impact of Iowa, which, hey, is looking like a pretty good call (if a rather lucky one).
(I think Minivet may be missing that Bloomberg is deliberately and ostentatiously skipping Iowa and New Hampshire, a strategy that will henceforward be known as The New York Mayor Gambit.)
That was my understanding as well. Nothing to be embarrassed about, in Iowa. That comes when he and Pete each get 21% in California, Biden gets 12%, Sanders gets 34% and Warren gets the balance.
Actually, that high. My prediction right now is Pete 17 Bloomberg 16 Biden 12 Sanders 34.
Bloomberg has been endorsed by Henry Louis Gates Jr, and John Mellencamp. I think that makes him unbeatable
In Indiana, maybe. But California?
Minivet?
He had lunch in Heebieville a few weeks ago, with Judge Judy.
And Mitt Romney will become the first Senator in US history
An awkward beauty is born.
82: Romney will become the first US Senator in American history to vote to remove a president of his own party.
That was really awkward.
Our mayor just endorsed him, as have a lot of other mayors. He's given a lot of money to local governments in recent years and seems to be calling in favors.
The second comment at that link is one of these, "When normalcy returns, shame will be HEAPED upon those assholes" which I think I believed when Trump was first elected but has deflated for me since. Ie it is wishful thinking that normalcy will return.
82/83: It's also completely wrong. Our first impeached President was almost convicted, purely on the votes of his own party's senators.
86 - No. Andrew Johnson was a Democrat (who ran a bipartisan ticket w Lincoln on the National Union ticket) and no Democratic Senators voted to impeach and remove. A bunch of Republicans voted no on removal.
Who will chimpeach the chimperors of yesteryear??
developing conventional wisdom that Biden's apparent weakness in Iowa means Bloomberg is now a serious contender. I'm skeptical.
I've been so baffled by this notion. It would make sense, after Iowa, for all the centrist powers (including Biden and Bloomberg) to unite behind Mayonnaise Pete. But the idea that now Bloomberg's gross, weird attempt to buy the WH would now be embraced by large numbers of Democrats looking for a savior? I just don't see it happening.
Bloomberg is definitely blanketing California with TV ads, I've seen them accidentally. Technically we're a Super Tuesday state, but mail-in ballots are coming into our mailboxes this week. In November 2018, 65% of our ballots were mailed.
I was just looking at the WaPo results breakdown, and suddenly Sanders overtook Buttigieg for the lead. While Buttigieg substantially narrowed the popular vote gap.
Crazy system. Still only 86% of precincts.
Misread the data on popular vote. Ignore!
You want a conspiracy theory? The NYT and others are not headlining the results of the first or final votes (where Bernie won) or the projected delegates (where Bernie is tied) but State Delegate Equivalents, where Buttigieg leads.
You could make a plausible argument for using the first, final or delegate counts as your headline number, but no matter what you want to measure, there is no narrative I can think of that justifies SDEs as the best measure.
I am sorta counting on California's usual rejection of extremely wealthy people buying the governorship (Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorini). It is definitely weird to see all the super progressive mayors backing Bloomberg, but apparently Bloomberg runs a mayors' training camp or something.
I saw a clip of a reporter asking Bloomberg something and he was so odd and stilted and perhaps heavily botoxed. It was peculiar. (On re-watching, I think it is because he is so still and doesn't have facial expressions.) I can't believe that people are taking 'don't run a woman again' away from 2016 instead of 'don't run an uncharismatic person again.'
I can't believe that people are taking 'don't run a woman again' away from 2016 instead of 'don't run an uncharismatic person again.'
Is there a more charismatic woman than Hillary in the race this year? The thing about Warren is that she has mostly been seen in relatively unmoderated settings, such as debates or interviews. As soon as the media start telling people what to think about her, everybody is going to find out that she is at least as uncharismatic as Hillary.
Klobuchar, too. She's only charismatic in the sense of having charisma. I doubt that she can avoid being Hillaried.
So in the end, avoiding uncharismatic candidates and avoiding women candidates is actually the same thing.
95: Which candidate does have charisma then? Serious question - when it comes to politicians, I'm pretty much charisma blind.
I find Warren charismatic in a way that I didn't with Clinton. To my eye, Clinton was too careful with her speech (for good reasons!). Warren doesn't give me the same impression (remember her Go Cougars tweet?).
96: I find Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Warren the most charismatic, and Joe's really not bad either. But I thought Hillary was charismatic, too, and genuinely believe that claims otherwise are a result of media brainwashing. (There are also some pretty charismatic folks who have been ousted from the Democratic primary. Corey Booker and Kamala Harris seem very charming to me.)
Compare Hillary to, say, GW Bush, John McCain, Al Gore, Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, Mike Dukakis or Donald Trump, and I think she comes out favorably. I think she's right up there with Mitt Romney and John Kerry (who, to be fair, are also not well-regarded, charisma-wise, but I think they do all right).
She ain't no Reagan, Obama or Bill Clinton, but who is?
People forget that in debates, she held her own against Obama and demolished Trump three times.
It was also a commonplace observation that, even when Hillary was a younger woman, she was unattractive. This, again, seems like brainwashing to me -- just objectively inaccurate. We were required to find her unattractive because that's just what those feminist types are.
The foregoing probably more-or-less qualifies as the dictionary definition of mansplaining, but there it is. It's what I believe.
I distrust political charisma, because I'm a neo-liberal-elitist-technocratic-corporatist-shill liberal who just wants to actually pass legislation that will actually improve the lives of actual people. And political charisma just seems so often to be working -- often very effectively, because charisma! -- against that goal.
That said, I met Cory Booker a few years ago, and yeah, he's got it.
I'm just understanding that all of 95 was sarcastic.
"She's only charismatic in the sense of having charisma:".
I might have figured out that this wasn't meant to be taken seriously. I guess I did eventually.
Okay, I'll stop. I guess I'm kind of a crank on this subject. But Elizabeth Warren? Charismatic? Seriously?
I mean, I think so. But as we have established, I'm a crank. She's more professorial than Obama without the compensating soaring rhetoric.
Buttigieg has got that nice, friendly, open-minded earnestness going for him. Klobuchar comes off as a pro -- someone smart and forceful who knows what she's talking about, much like Hillary. (Okay, really, I'll stop.)
With Obama, B. Clinton and Reagan, they had this quality where you smile when you see them on the screen. (I mean, I hated that fucker Reagan, and threw things at the screen, but I understand his appeal.)
Warren really does make me happy every time I see her on TV -- but I'd feel the same way about Bernie if it weren't for his asshole supporters online, and I think we can all agree that while he has a certain je ne sais quoi, Bernie is pretty much anti-charismatic.
George W. Bush was a guy with very little charisma -- barely above the level of his father -- but the media decided you want to have a beer with him, so you sheeple believed it. Me, I'd much rather have a beer with She Whom We Do Not Name.
I do think Elizabeth Warren is the most charismatic, if you listen at least a little to what she's saying, rather than merely the affect. They're connected! She's trying to tell you something real that she cares about, and it shows. Whereas Obama had amazing affect, but what he was saying too often boiled down to the same soaring, multiply-interpretable rhetoric.
PF and I seem to have very different definitions of charisma. Warren has charisma; GWB had charisma.
We have already established that I'm a weirdo. But Jesus Fucking Christ, GWB made my skin crawl -- and I mean during the campaign, when we could reasonably imagine that he wasn't a complete asshole.
... But do you recall, the most charismatic candidate of all, Rudolph that called Judith Nathan "dear'?
I find Bernie very charismatic, the charisma of anti-charisma perhaps, but that may just be my Brooklyn roots talking.
He had a very shiny head?
And if you ever saw him, he would fill your heart with dread.
I also think Warren has charisma
Sanders sounds like Super Dave Osborne. This strike me as in his favor, but not enough to move Warren from my first choice.
if you listen at least a little to what she's saying, rather than merely the affect.
But: that's not charisma (and that's why I distrust charisma...)
I find Warren charismatic. Then again, I also found HRC charismatic. (TFA has my little story about meeting HRC and WJC a few weeks apart in 2000, and having very non-stereotypical reactions to them).
I've been within a few feet, I guess, of both Booker and Biden, and find them poles apart on the charisma scale.
IHMB in 2003 I was in a four person conversation that included HRC and EMK, and she was definitely holding her own, charisma-wise.
But: that's not charisma (and that's why I distrust charisma...)
I find it a little artificial to define charisma in a way that requires disregarding content - for most of how we relate to people, what's being said is at least a part of it, no?
OED definition (first brought into English via a translation of Weber's Protestant Ethic, interestingly): "A gift or power of leadership or authority; aura. Hence, the capacity to inspire devotion or enthusiasm." I think that casts a wide net. The Wikipedia article is similarly capacious.
Oh geez, I didn't realize we were allowed to include Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in our calculations. Does Weber account for the guns? Do gun-heavy, trigger-happy Americans even enter into his account of the historical origins of Protestantism?
I sort of think not, but please correct me where I have gone wrong.
120 I'm amazed by this question. I find Sen Booker quite charismatic, and was very disappointed that the debate format really didn't provide the right platform for showing why.
Do gun-heavy, trigger-happy Americans even enter into his account of the historical origins of Protestantism?
Yes, very substantially, at least if you are the kid in my history class at school who made a succession of very surprising assertions about the course of the Reformation that only made sense when we realised that he thought Martin Luther was the same person as Martin Luther King.
I want to know more about how the assassination of Martin Luther on a hotel balcony in Memphis precipitated the the 30 years' war.
Almost all politicians above the level of city councillor have far more charisma if you meet them in person than you expect. This is because their public image is filtered through the media, and at least some of the media hate everybody, though not all of it hates the same people.
Clearly it all started with the attempt by Robert Kennedy, the Winter Senator, to become Elector of the Palatinate of New York.
But where does the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris, Texas, fit into the timeline?
That secret went into the ground with the Defenestration of Bethesda.
I think there may be such a thing as relative or conditional charisma vs absolute charisma.
Blair had absolute charisma; you might hate him, indeed hate him for it, but you couldn't avoid experiencing it, especially if you were the intended audience. People claimed David Cameron had it, but rather like GWB I couldn't see it at all - he seemed either bland and insincere, or else swaggeringly arrogant, rather like Bush was usually either doing a bit of Reagan he learned by heart or else walking into doors and talking about strategery.
I just realized Bloomberg is 77 years old.
OTOH, I also recently realized that Mittens Romney is 72, older than I thought. I guess not drinking and being born wealthy helps ease the aging process.
Also the whole portrait-in-the-attic thing.
I've mentioned before that I was at an event that had speakers GWB, Vicente Fox, Joschka Fischer and Shimon Peres, and of the 4, GWB had far and away the weakest command of the English language. (This was before 9/11).
122: That was what I figured, but people have said counterintuitive things in this thread, and in-person experiences can be different.
If I were studying charisma I'd set some metric like 'time until 20% of the audience looks at their phones'. I saw Jill Stein at a meeting of progressives and the whole meeting was looking at their phones within minutes. Then some college kid with no official power stood up to make an announcement and everyone hung on her words. The contrast was striking and that's when I developed my theory that charisma is a real thing and absolutely necessary in a popularity contest.
Sure, I believe that charisma with a crowd and charisma in person can be different. But I don't want to go through another election with an uncharismatic-to-crowds candidate because that deficit is insurmountable.
Living in MA as I do, I know people who have been with Warren in small groups. They say she is really good in such settings. I don't know exactly how that corresponds to charisma, though.
I have known people who were very good in small groups and hopeless in crowds. Blair is great even down the telephone. Bob Runcie was overwhelmingly charismatic in person, and could flop horribly with crowds, though this was only intermittent.
Living in MA as I do, I know people who have been with Warren in small groups. They say she is really good in such settings.
I was in a small group with Warren two days ago and she was amazing. I felt like she was talking directly to me and everyone else in the group probably felt the same way.
I'm glad to hear it wasn't just me being fooled by his accent that made Blair seem charismatic.
Obama was a great candidate because, for once, the media liked the Democrat, or, at least, they were awed by his coolness.
Charisma is the thing that makes it easy for people to pay attention to you. They feel attuned and they feel you're attuned to them. Maybe not in terms of beliefs and values, but in terms of sentence length, pauses, pacing of what they're saying, etc.
Like: a normal public speaker uses a pronoun or acronym, and everyone is lost for a minute, and some people drift off for the rest. A charismatic speaker uses the acronym, feels the temperature in the room shift ever so slightly, and they pause and smile, and then hunt for two seconds, which puts them in alignment with the crowd, and then they produce the missing word that everyone needed. They stayed in sync with the audience, giving all sorts of body language cues. Flash a smile, keep going.
The most telling is how the speaker handles a moment of dullness in their speaking. Do they not notice and drone on? Or do they read the room and give some cues that they're attuned to their dullness, like pause and spread their arms and smile cheekily, and say "hang in there, I'm ALMOST to my point" and then wrap it up quick, delivering a worthy payoff?
I have a related theory, which I'm sure I've related here, about how very charismatic people often think they're great writers when they're actually mediocre writers.
A charismatic person writes a thing, and hears it delivered in their own, charming voice. But of course, the reader reads it using their own delivery.
A great writer knows to make the writing generate its own, charismatic delivery. So pauses need to be built in, the pacing needs to be controlled, etc, so that when the readers are reading it to themselves, they are tilted towards a charismatic, well-paced delivery. Not that there's a rigid formula for a charming writing style any more than there is for public speaking, but when you have something pull you in, it easily holds your attention.
The canonical source in Weber is not the Protestant Ethic but Economy and Society, in particular the chapters starting here: https://archive.org/details/MaxWeberEconomyAndSociety/page/n349/mode/2up
lurid knows more about this stuff than I do, though.
Somehow the Biden campaign got my telephone number and recognized it as a cell and started texting me to ask for help in NH. I text people when I need to meet them or discuss what groceries to pick up. Otherwise I detest texting and resent that my personal space is being invaded. They've done this twice after I asked them to stop. Now I hate them.
You need to text back "O.K. Boomer" to get them to stop.
Did Tweety Chris Matthews have a stroke or something? His face looks so odd and his speech sounds weird.
at least if you are the kid in my history class at school who made a succession of very surprising assertions about the course of the Reformation that only made sense when we realised that he thought Martin Luther was the same person as Martin Luther King
This made me laugh out loud.
(Probably because it took me a while to get my Martin Luthers figured out: they didn't teach us much about the Reformation, nor about US history, at my Canadian RC school...).
142. I sympathize. I've been texted twice by Bloomberg. Not my choice in the primary at all. A while back I was getting texts for some elections in Harris County, Texas. I don't live there and my area code isn't there either. They did stop after I said it was a waste of their effort.
The canonical source in Weber is not the Protestant Ethic but Economy and Society
The OED cites Economy and Society in the definition as the ultimate German origin, 1922, but Protestant Ethic as the first cited English use, 1930. If Wikipedia can be gone by, PE was the first Weber book to be translated into English, EaS not until 1947, or not in full until 1968.
