"....In the USA in particular, the electorate in recent years has tended to show a warmer response to candidates who seem approachable and even flawed. George W Bush's garbled talk and alcoholic past seem to have made him more, rather than less acceptable, whilst both Al Gore and John Kerry, with their more aloof and intellectual personae, struggled to win hearts and minds..............
Until the recent election of Barack Obama, in the last thirty years the only Democrats to succeed at the Presidency were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who both came from less privileged family backgrounds, and whose 'smartness' was cloaked with the persona of Southern charm and their emotional ability to relate to other people - a trait shared by Obama...."
In Chapter 7 of her book "The Selfish Society - How we all forgot to love one another and made money instead" psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt explains how the act of voting is not a clinical, reasoned process but for the vast majority of people the decision of who to give their vote to comes instead from the emotional centre of the brain, and is essentially an unconscious process.
This insight should alert those of us on the left who seem to be assuming that just because the coalition government is held in very low public esteem, this inevitably means Labour will romp home with a respectable majority come May 2015.
This might be true if the current Prime Minister were to lead the Conservatives into the next general election; George Osborne and David Cameron have very little credibility on the economy now and their brutal attacks on the most vulnerable have earned the Tories back the title of The Nasty Party once again...
Rumour has it that Boris Johnson is the favourite to succeed Cameron to lead his party and while he obviously comes across as a bit of a bumbling fool the Labour Party would dismiss him at their peril I think.
As Gerhardt points out, and I completely agree with her, the public like someone they can relate to, someone they feel like they sort of know, they don't mind the mistakes, there's a sense of reassurance that you won't be so ripped off by a bloke who seems down to earth and can laugh at himself even more than you laugh at him. This perhaps sets Johnson aside from say Neil Kinnock who the media loved to portray as a bit of a loser (but who actually had a very able mind.)
I wrote recently that in my view the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee would make an excellent leader of a left leaning party because she can hold her own against the best of them on economics.. education.. social affairs to name but a few, but she also happens to have a very likeable personality. She can be matter of fact and tell it straight with no frills and she can also engage female communication skills too and express genuine compassion when talking about human suffering. She's greatly respected and much loved and I think she holds the role of the nation's sort of surrogate big sister. She'd look out for you if the bully's at school were nicking your dinner money... Something about her feels very safe and reliable...
Ed Miliband meanwhile seems to have this geeky but genius little brother persona. You'd never take him to a pick up joint, he'd cramp your style too much.. but if you were going to a pub quiz you'd want him on your team to secure the 200 quids worth of HMV vouchers at the end of the night - and you'd probably get them too!
Boris Johnson clearly has bucketloads of charisma, but he does come across as a bit of an amateur who's making it up as he goes along. And the sort of amateur who tells everyone he hasn't got a f-king clue what he's supposed to be doing but he's having a great time anyhow! Johnson is like the drunk uncle you always get at weddings, who monopolises the dance floor for the whole of "Satisfaction" and spends the rest of the evening getting tanked up at the bar and saying "My how you've grown" as he drools over all the bridesmaids!!
And that could be a problem for Ed Miliband if come polling day the electorate feel disillusioned with grown up politics but instead feel in the mood for a budget family wedding with a p!ssed up pubsinger!....
Quote taken from "The Selfish Society - How we all forgot to love one another and made money instead" -Sue Gerhardt, 2010
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