You have to be able to win elections at that level, and there's no participation trophies for feel-good runs by someone with a handicap, you just lose.
Unclear, but certainly not 0.
Things like empathy, quick thinking, emotional intelligence, a fresh perspective, broad knowledge of the world, a large vocabulary, and the self-confidence to go with your judgement calls are all involved in telling a single good joke to a crowd.
These are all fantastic things to see in a leader.
A group united towards a stupid purpose can be more effective than individuals acting towards more reasonable purposes. If this is true, you can select for both following (susceptibility) and leading (charisma).
I think to say that Donald Trump is anything but narrowly good at Charisma and personal marketing is a stretch.
I wouldn’t give him an integral to solve but that’s not what a leader is supposed to do either.
I think a major world leader needs more than charisma but it’s one of the first requirements.
What intellectually rigorous activity would you say he has an aptitude in?
Looking at the glowing media coverage of him pre-2015, he seems like a unique business genius.
The truth is probably in between.
Business and marketing aren’t rigorous intellectual activities like math, but they are bloody hard in a different way - even with an inheritance (how many born-rich kids die 100x richer? Almost none). The problems are very fuzzy and open-ended, and frequently don’t even look like a problem.
You can’t consistently solve these problems profitably over many years without some skill.
To be considered charming to a large group of people, like half the USA, you need to be conversant in things that are relevant to all of them. A narrow person can never have a wide appeal.
You're arguing a different point. This isn't about charisma. It's about a baseline level of communication.
I'm a Joe supporter but in recent interviews (like BET) there were two parts where I could not make out what he said after 10 rewinds.
The smart but uncharismatic folks seem better suited to institutional roles where they can guide policy in the right direction without being the public face of the policy. It's not all that different from the distinction between sales and the folks that design/make the product; the groups are complementary but divergent.
The one we live in, it is a hard disqualification, and there's an election in 3 months.
We won't fix everything that is broken with how people select leaders in the next 3 months.
There is clearly something wrong with him that was not in evidence in 2020. Whether it's Parkinson's, senility, 12-day-old jet lag, I don't know. But it's clear that it's hard for him to carry on a conversation, and that is basically the job of a politician.
I'm honestly not sure what we're looking for in a debate, but most presidential debates since I've been a voter are contests to see who can look like they're listening the best while getting back to a rehearsed talking point the fastest. [1] When you combine that with trouble with words, and maybe some over training, it doesn't look good.
Does it mean he has trouble carrying on a conversation in a real setting? I don't know, it's a totally different setting with different expectations. We don't really get a window into that.
[1] Well except that MTV town hall. Pretty sure Bill had no talking points appropriate there.
But now his difficulty seems to come from difficulty understanding what is happening around him. He seemed confused by his surroundings multiple times during that awful debate.
I've seen a lot of Biden supporters pointing to his stutter and speaking difficulties, but his troubles have qualitatively and quantitatively changed, and definitely for the worse.
Maybe 10 years ago it was that.
But in the last couple of months, it's like his tongue is not moving right. I literally can't understand some of his sentences now, the syllables are so slurred and garbled.
could you point out the timestamp where his speech impediment is evident? this was 8 years ago and he appears to be a silver-tongued devil
Over the last few months I've generally defending his gaffs to friends even though I don't like Biden as a politician, because I think that kind of discourse is counterproductive politically and stigmatising socially, which I still feel.
However, I have to say, the recent downward spike in his ability to string a sentence together becomes concerning to me, not so much because I think it primary reflects any cognitive decline per se, but it seems to me like a sign that the pressure of the presidency and the campaign are affecting him in _some_ way that is causing his speech impediment to surface at its worst and most frequent yet. So I would still push back on a lot of what you are saying, but yes, at this point, something is clearly off there to a concerning degree.
However, when someone was previously verbally fluent and then the whole world can see that that person’s fluency has deteriorated, it’s completely reasonable to believe that deterioration of other mental functions is happening as well, as seems to be the case with Biden.
I occasionally call my kids by each others' names. My parents would call me by my brothers' names. This is a running joke in large families. I occasionally in large meetings swap the names of two products we're talking about and have to be corrected. It's just a very low-grade "verbal dyslexia" that means nothing except that the brain isn't a perfectly-wired machine.
* Swapping a name as he’s known to do, with the name of the person who is contextually-adjacent and the other main character?
* Thinking the man he just finished discussing our continual support against Russian expansion, was actually Vladimir Putin himself?
I’m only saying that life-long wors-swapping is not dementia, as so many say.
The current generation reaching voting age would much rather send a text than call so.....
Whatever Trump says can be construed as some sort of 4d chess hidden message because of a cult of personality that has developed around him. He can hint that asylum seekers escaped from mental asylums but his base will not suspect that he may be the one confusing the two words and instead they will just cheer at the grotesque image because that's the kind of politically incorrect thing they want somebody to say (regardless of whether Trump did that on purpose or not).
I have the feeling that whatever Trump will say and will do will never ever be scrutinized by his side in a way that even remotely resembles the scrutiny to switch Biden has to be subjected to.
And that double standard speaks a lot on the troubled times we're living through.
His vocal cords are fine, it's just that the words don't make much sense, which is a pretty big problem in that position.
Dude, you just completely made that up. Certainly every news outlet I recall, from NY Times, WaPo and CNN to Fox News and the WSJ were all running a ton of articles questioning Biden's fitness for another term. None of them were "boldly proclaiming" anything.
Even the Democratic Party has given up on the far-fetched excuses. It’s time to surrender to the evidence. That example is just one out of dozens.
Anyone who thinks that Biden got confused and thought he was in a press conference with Vladimir Putin (!!) is just spouting nonsense.
That said, it's pretty obvious a lot of energy and fire that Biden previously had is no longer present. Or at least very inconsistently present.
the extreme change is worrisome. i mean is this him now? will it keep deteriorating? why would anyone think it wont. how much of a medical concern will be 1 year later. 2 3? this is what people are concerned with
2010, "Joe Biden, the vice-president who keeps putting his foot in it": https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/28/joe-biden-vice...
Those were just the top two results in Google for "biden vice president gaffe", limiting the date to before 2016.
I mean, it's probably gotten worse, although I can't really judge that. But it's certainly not a new thing. I'm not saying he's not too old and tired, I'm just saying that merely the mixing up of a name alone really isn't a sign of incompetence.
The doublespeak from the Republican side regarding Biden's capabilities has been, frankly, astonishing.
That said, it's infuriating when you have an opponent that can literally say whatever he wants however unintelligible it may be and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said. The double standard is astonishing.
But yeah obviously there certainly are better candidates than Biden to run for president. Why he or she hasn't been found in 2020 eludes me.
Yeah, just three days ago, praising Hannibal Lecter, or remember "covfefe" from a few years back? Or the QAnon bunch where some people managed to assemble millions of people [1] by essentially doing "tea leaves predictions" on Trump speeches?
There is no equivalent to that level of derangedness on the Democrat side, not even close.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/qanon-groups-have-mil...
Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.
That one was a response to "and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said", because that is precisely what QAnon was/is: a bunch of people poring over Trump speeches and every tiny utterance of anyone in his circle to find "hidden meanings" like alleged raids on "pedos".
> Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.
He misspeaks and needs to correct himself. Yes. That's completely undeniable.
But hell, listen to a Trump speech and to a Biden speech. Trump is just a plain stream-of-consciousness braindump all the time, Biden at least generally manages to stick to the prompt.
Unfortunately, Trump has what I call the "entertainer instinct": he knows exactly and most especially instinctively how to entertain masses, how to make pictures and quotes. The best example is him getting shot - 99.999% of people would have fled, he raises his fist and yells "fight".
And in a political climate where it's not facts but pure and utter showmanship that wins an election, that's a problem.
Well we had the 2020 primaries. Bernie and Warren were too left to win a general election. Pete Buttigieg won Iowa, got 2nd in New Hampshire, but only cancelled the campaign after South Carolina, once it dawned that the South has too much of a quiet problem of Buttigieg being gay and preferring Biden simply because he was Obama VP. Without those sad facts, we could've had Buttigieg winning 2020 and 2024.
Being ugly is a disqualifying trait for getting a job as a supermodel.
Being unfit is a disqualifying trait for being an Olympic athlete.
Being unable to stay awake and say coherent sentences is a disqualifying trait for being the president of the most powerful nation on earth.
Being black or latino is a disqualifying trait for playing a Roman emperor in a movie — which is why Netlix will surely try, because they’re unable to comprehend what the problem even is, and why their “equality” is groan-inducing.
PS: If I was a US citizen, I would vote for AOC not because of her sex or race but because neither of those influence my decision. Do they influence yours?
A latino man could almost certainly fit, though.
Given a person playing a Roman Emperor is acting in a role not laboring as a ruler, consider that:
The emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius -- among Rome's best and wisest rulers -- and the poet Seneca all were of Spanish origin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/horizon/june9...
The Four African Emperors were Septimius Severus, Clodius Albinus, Marcus Macrinus and Aemilianus.
Being born in Roman Hispania isn't the same as being "of Spanish origin" or "latinx". Being born in Africa doesn't make you black. Elon Musk is the richest African in the world.
If Shaq had been born in China, would he be a good candidate to portray first sovereign Emperor of China?
A black bear born in the arctic isn't a polar bear.