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Comment by mqt | Hacker News Reader

At this level in politics, all candidates have "leadership qualities." Unless there is a large difference in height (5+ inches, which doesn't happen very often), no one is going to notice.

Bush is shorter than both Gore and Kerry. Guess what? He has much more charisma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heights_of_United_State...

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At this level in politics, all candidates have "charisma" too. He only has more charisma if you define it a posteriori as having won the election.

> Bush is shorter than both Gore and Kerry. Guess what? He has much more charisma.

But he lost the popular vote to Gore. So charisma understands the electoral college?

No, I disagree. There are plenty of completely uncharismatic politicians around. (John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, Bob Dole, Bush the Elder).

None of them got elected president (except Bush 41, and he was running against Dukakis). All of the data pg used in his argument was about winning presidential general elections.

Is that your list or the official list? The point that started this wasn't that Person X is charismatic while Person Y isn't. It's relative. Second, who judges who is more charismatic, even relatively? Again, the person above says that Bush Jr. was more charismatic than Gore, but the popular vote said the opposite.

Gore did not win the popular vote by a large margin. According to Wikipedia, he was ahead a mere 543,816 (0.5%) votes. [1] It was only the third time in history that a candidate lost while winning popular vote. I don't think you should dwell on that particular point. Can you find examples in other elections where the theory falls apart?

Also, the second footnote in the essay offers the reason that Bush did not focus his campaigning on the popular vote. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_200...

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html#f2n

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