Is Mitt Romney a classically charismatic leader?

Fatally, I asked myself this question over vacation last week....thus here we are,back ruminating about power and charisma...again.
:)
On the face of it Romney has few charismatic attributes.
He is at best an indifferent speaker,unctuous and insincere, prone to mind-numbing "power point" presentations.
On the stump, Mitt is no Pitchfork Ben Tillman.
His pattern runs to droning and grinning, droning and grinning...
Moreover the reform ethos he claims as his own has a fairly low key leadership tradition here in the Bay State.
As I've said before, Romney's "reform agenda" is naught but a windy rhetorical exercise designed to cloak a fairly unoriginal brand of corporate state politics.
In an rhetorical sense, Romney the leader offers less than any of his three GOP predecessors.
All charismatic political figures offer a kind of "leadership myth"....with Reagan it was his survival of an assassination attempt, with the current President it is a sort of self-selected cowboy fighter jock hybrid....or at least that is what is on offer this week.
Even John Kerry offers us a narrative composed of his war-wounds and principled opposition to the Viet Nam War...something for everyone it seems.
What does Romney offer by way of a leadership myth?
His stalwart battle to reduce price gouging at the souvenir shops during the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics....
Paltry stuff by way of heroism.
Romney is a bit of a demagogue though...he is certainly exploiting the gay marriage thing for the maximum emotional advantage.
However he is doing it in a passive-aggressive legalistic fashion....there is little fiery zeal in his whining demands that the legislature permit him to personally lobby the SJC.
That could change though, as we move along to the fall campaign there will be ample opportunities for bombastic rhetoric from the Governor and his hand selected lower level candidates.
"Saving" the state for "traditional marriage" is a pretty potent leadership myth and a juicier issue than mere reform.
However the issue doesn't create charisma, it's charisma that makes the issue resonate.
Here Romney falls short.
I think Romney would like to govern via charisma, but his only hope after fourteen months in office is to simply buy that style of leadership wholesale in the fashion of his patron George Bush Jr.
This commodification of charismatic leadership I call pseudo-charisma...something he will need when it comes time spew and rant in the snows of New Hampshire.
Just remember Mitt, pseudo charisma costs money, just ask Karl Rove.

Otherwise despite an impressive package Romney just doesn't have the real stuff.
However, the matter requires observation...

A retraction…

Several months ago, I noted wrongly that Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory was the late Mary McGrory’s son.
I was wrong, in fact they are cousins according to Ms. McGrory’s obit last week.
Whoops…what can I say?
I’m sorry.
Chimes at Midnight is merely crude self-edited ideological warfare…mistakes (to paraphrase Saint Reagan the simpleminded) are made.
I still think Brian is a tedious Mickey Spillane type scribbler…
:)

In yesterday’s Globe…

I noticed the following headline:
“Romney: gay outsiders can’t marry in Ma.”

Apparently, the only thing confirmed outsiders can do in Massachusetts is run for Governor.
IF they have the money that is…

Good Grief, the Kolobian Viceroy can’t shut his yap about gay marriage for nary a moment! Every day he has to shout long and loud about the perils of faggotry so that the wowsers of Alabama can hear him properly.
You wouldn’t mind so much but the 1913 law Governor Decaf is invoking was designed to prevent inter-racial marriage…a very controversial issue indeed back in the palmy days of Woodrow Wilson.
Ya see the irony here?
Why do we let this shameless lout run amok like this?
The state is bedeviled with a legislature drunk on it’s own pseudo-pedagogy, the unemployment rate creeps ever higher, the bureaucracy is crammed with inert buffoons, and the municipalities are going bust one after another?
THIS is reform?
THESE are the reformers?
Dear Ghod I’m beginning to long for the enlightened rule of provincial insiders like Frank Sargent and Maurice Tobin.
At least THEY were uncursed with national ambitions a mere eighteen months into their first terms of office!

Sick
Demented
Typical

Friday Notes:

Isn't it funny to see that behind all the bluster, utopian illusions, and threats, basically Bush's current Iraq policy has been entirely cribbed from John Kerry?
Bush wants to bring in the U.N. expand the coalition partnerships, de-emphasizes American participation...all stuff suggested by John Kerry months ago.
It is just that Bush is doing a botched half-assed job of implementing these options.
It is hardly a radical proposal, mostly it is designed to give us some breathing space while we try to patch together a sensible diplomatic policy for the region.
Hell, the Syrians claim Bush has been soliciting their help in the current crisis...what does that tell you?
However, just who in La Famiglia Arbusto is supposed to round up these fresh partners?...Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney?
All defeated men in one way or another, bereft of credibility and ideas.
Meanwhile, as seen in his catastrophic press conference this week, even Bush has no clue as to whom we are handing over sovereignty in Iraq come June.
Either Cheney and Wolfowitz haven't told him yet or else no one really knows.
So truly, the worst is yet to come.

And on that note, I go on vacation next week...this blog will be infrequently updated if at all.
But I'll be back Monday the 26th so don't worry.
That having been said, if it all goes to smash, and I don't come back...try to remember I was once an eagle.
:)

Item:

The Kolobian Viceroy is seemingly demanding the state legislature declare him an "attorney" so that he can argument for a stay in the gay marriage decision before the SJC.
Or rather he wants to appoint what amounts to a special counsel or to argue his fag bashing routine and bypass the AG entirely.
THIS is how badly Governor Decaf needs to play to his beloved out of state wowsers, he'll over turn any statute in order to further their interests at the expense of the commonwealth's citizenry.
As I've blogged earlier, as the law currently reads, only the Attorney General can represent the Governor before Supreme Judicial Court and Reilly ain't cooperating.
Well, why not demand the lege abolish the AG's office entirely and vote Romney a nice Laurel Crown while they are at it?
It is all of the same thing.

Are we to re-write the laws of Massachusetts so that Romney can belabor an issue ad infinitum?
Does Romney have any respect at all for the democratic process?
Is there anything in his sworn oath as Governor about kowtowing to powerful out of state fanatics?
The reign of the monocausal GOP hack is now complete, if George Bush's answer to every question is a tax cut, and Romney's sole response is a craven assault on the rights and lives of a sexual minority.
Sick
Demented
Typical

I caught about...

a half hour of the President's much touted prime time press conference last night.
If those thirty minutes are indicative of the Commander in Chief's mindset, this country is in so much more trouble than I had originally believed.
Chimes at Midnight, (aka "The Little Blog that Cried") is proudly partisan and makes no bones about it's daily dose of ideological warfare.
But good grief, all due sniping aside, what an asinine, inane, whining, incoherent, disheveled, self pitying press conference!
THIS is Karl Rove's political thoroughbred???
George Bush Jr. that "Sea Biscuit" of the pols, famously relentless on message and reliably folksy to a fault?
He sounded like a pleased teachable from the Fernald School fuh crissakes!
And that was when he wasn't spouting dangerous utopian nonsense, repeating himself like a broken record and affecting weird facial expressions that bespoke Bush's boredom with his own mendacity.
Good Ghod it was an embarrassingly amateurish performance even by Bush Jr. standards.
What did the President start hallucinating or something...the press corpse turned into giant talking Jack Daniels bottle before his eyes?
No wonder he looked so scared and befuddled!
JANE SWIFT could've done a better job of fielding those questions!
And Jingle Money was dumber than nine chickens!

Meanwhile, as the President stumbled through this disastrous performance (at one point he referred to Donald Rumsfeld as "The Secretary of State") off to one side sat the Three Horsemen of Disaster, battered shopworn Andy Card, bloated Karl Rove, and Dr. Condoleeza Rice her face an immobile mask of pure hatred.

But ah, hatred directed at whom, the White House Press corpse that was peppering Bush with simple questions that the President evaded or refused to answer?

Dr. Rice was probably fantasizing like a demented schoolgirl about the Marine Corps barging in and bayoneting the entire White House Press Corps on live TV. Then a hunky Marine Private puts a tiara on her head and proclaims the National Security Advisor "queen of the marines"....
Meanwhile in the background her President keeps droning on about a free Iraq with a free market and plenty of school vouchers for the chillun' and loads of yummy tax breaks.

Or maybe Dr. Rice has come to loathe the President, the author of all her present woes?

I'll be Condi was wishing she was back at Stanford grading and basking in the adulation of undergraduate co-eds.
Hell I think Condi was wishing last night she was Dejah Thoris, riding her six legged thoat across the martian landscape.
Really ANYTHING to take her mind off this feeble, repetitive presidential wretch to whom she is manacled for the duration.

I don't think that the President answered one question honestly in the entire half hour increment that I saw.
Mostly he indulged clumsy evasions or else babbled incoherently when faced with a particularly difficult inquiry.
When asked why he was going before the 9-11 commission accompanied by the Vice President, Bush simply refused to answer at all.
Ghod look what the 9-11 Commission has to look forward to, the absolute disintegration of a sitting President of the United States right before their eyes.
If we won't answer the press' questions in a relevant engaged fashion...how will he do when the commission lights into him?
Geez maybe Cheney should've gone out there with him last night?
If this is the level Bush is functioning at, then the press corpse is well within it's rights to start skipping these new conferences entirely.
Just let the guy wallow in cliches on national television and be done with it.
He isn't answering the questions anyway so why bother?

Such is the Kingdom of Heaven
On the congressionally licenses airwaves
And elsewhere
4-14-04
1:15pm EST
God Save the Republic
God Save the Commonwealth

The President's Iraq policy is in ruins...

cautioned Condi did exactly nothing for her leader's plummeting poll numbers.
Hence Bush sighs, swears, and cuts short another vacation to fly back to DC for a rare press conference.
Normally this would be an option fraught with peril for the famously incoherent George Bush Jr....But with spineless cretins like the New York Times' Elisabeth familiar in the press corpse, his majesty can look forward to an easy time of it.
It is a measure of Bush's personal contempt for the White House press contingent that he is appearing sans the comforting presence of his nominal vice presidential puppet master Dick Cheney.
Clearly this is one situation that President Pinocchio can handle all by himself like a big boy.
No doubt, Bush will reiterate his asinine and embarrassing "we didn't know nuthin'" defense regarding the 8-6-01 PDB.
It is not about knowing anything though, it is about caring and by all estimates La Famiglia Arbusto couldn't have cared less about terrorism prior to the World Trade Center attacks on 9-11.
They thought Al Queda was a paltry Clinton-era feelgood sort of a threat....stuff and nonsense compared to the looming menace of Russia's aging collection of liquid fueled ICBM's.
A threat so terrifying it required a multi-billion dollar revival of strategice defense to deal with it.
Or so Dr. Rice was going to assert that very day in a never used speech.
Thus the planes sailed into the buildings....
Alas this is La Famiglia Arbusto we are talking about, their greatest weakness is that none of them can ever ever admit they were wrong or even complacent.
This character flaw will be Bush's downfall, either this year or a thousand days from now...but it will count on it.

Sick
Demented
Typical...