The ‘Likability’ Issue Everyone Ignores

I’ve been pushing back against what I’ve been referring to as the hair-shirt brigade (those that were calling on Biden to step down for, to me, stupid reasons.) ever since they started cropping up post-debate. First, I focused on educating about dirty debate strategy, because I swear that people saw what happened at the debate, but they don’t understand what happened at the debate. When that fell on deaf ears (they become conveniently deaf when faced with truths they can’t spin to their narrative.) I began pointing out the problems with available candidates to replace the president on the ticket.

In my mind, the only viable alternative to President Biden is Vice President Harris. But I, like many, have my doubts about her viability as a candidate. I happily acknowledge that she’s highly qualified and she’s done well as VP, but I notice that she has the same flaw I saw in Hillary Clinton: the dreaded, “likability problem.” Likability is a nebulous term, however lacking the quality is far too frequently the death of otherwise great candidates.

Someone in a group discussion said “likability” was a double standard, with women on the losing end. I’ll admit, my knee-jerk reaction was to argue against the proposition, but after maybe ten seconds I came to the conclusion that there was a double standard there and then I asked my natural follow-up: why? Why does Harris have a likability problem when she’s probably a perfectly nice person and Trump, who is well-known as a narcissistic, hateful, gasbag doesn’t suffer from it at all?

Why do Republican women not suffer the same “likability” issues that Democrat women do? Marjorie Taylor Greene is an awful human being but she doesn’t suffer the same issues as Harris. Greene’s fatal flaw is that she’s stone stupid.

Alexandria Occasio Cortez doesn’t suffer from “likability” issues either and she’s brilliant. I honestly think she could win the presidency sometime soon… so why doesn’t she suffer from the issues I see in Harris? When the reason came to me, it felt so obvious I was almost ashamed of myself.

AOC isn’t seen as elitist, but Harris, like Hillary Clinton is. So, the question became why do women like Harris and Hillary Clinton get hit with the “elitist” tag when men like Bill Clinton (a literal Rhodes Scholar) manage to avoid it? Perhaps it’s the fact that women in the Democratic Party have to work much harder to establish bona fides as being a person worth listening to and thus can’t shake the specter of elitism.

But how does AOC fit into this fact pattern? She’s not elite. She has a bachelors in international relations and economics from Boston University (not ivy league), no post-grad degrees, and she worked as an activist while moonlighting as a bartender. There’s little in her CV that would lend rhetorical weight, but people listen to her… people follow her.

It can be argued that she’s an excellent communicator. In her recent Instagram live, she made a rock solid case for keeping Biden at the top of the ticket, and she did so with impressive sensitivity. How does she thread that particular needle?

I’d argue that her time spent behind the bar has served her better than Clinton and Harris’ time as members of the bar. Bartending can be a masterclass in communication across the broad spectrum of humanity and AOC took those lessons and uses them in her government work. She has an almost singular talent for reaching out.

Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, lost because he’s painted as both elitist and an idiot. Ivy League educated, military officer, but rarely in contact with the rank and file, assistant US attorney — as far as anyone can tell, he’s actively kept regular Americans at arm’s length. DeSantis is elitism writ large.

DeSantis can also be painted as an idiot, too stupid to understand that pudding requires a spoon to eat. His stupidity is documented. He’s the perfect storm of unelectable to the presidency.

So why did Trump, who is completely disconnected from real life and is a provable moron, successful as a presidential candidate? It may be a simple matter of using his celebrity (reality TV is a thoroughly populist form of media, which connected him to Americans at all levels) and his mind-numbing stupidity (too dumb to make the idea that he knows better than to spout his obvious bullshit seem plausible) to give rise to the worst instincts in the populace. He also uses any perceivable weakness in his opponents, ballooning it through reactionary rhetoric, to make them look weak, despite him usually having the same or worse issue only in greater measure.

Trump plays the public perception game by fueling the reactionary narrative so thoroughly that no other issue can break through. And all too often, the electorate falls for it. As it stands now, the hair-shirt brigade and the watermelon emoji caucus (both reactionary movements) have a death grip on traditional media and the punditry class on the Left, and it’s negatively effecting every liberal candidate’s likability and electability.

It’s time to force the reactionaries to lower the temperature. We can’t function as a nation when panicked, fact-resistant partisans are setting our collective har on fire. Let’s make reactionaries unlikable again.