Looking good doesn't automatically translate to being good at politics, but it gives your political success a serious boost, and there is a slew of research that backs this up:
Is winning re-election really the metric for a great leader? If anything, an effective leader is going to have more opposition when it comes to re-election. No one is concerned with an ineffective leader, least of all their enemies.
I'm assuming half of your point is humour and the other is the fact you don't like his glasses.
It is on this second half I'd like to comment.
It shifts the focus on form rather than content.
Sure form has its non-negligible role, but in politics and most domains it should never take precedence over content, the actual message itself.
And here lies one part of the problem Lessig is trying to go after: the corruption of our mind in its ability to be seduced by form at the expense of content.
It is that kind of corruption that makes it possible for movie actors without real political substance to become president.
It is that kind of corruption that makes the present political system a democratic farce.
If we want him to succeed we have to do our part too, and it's precisely because we haven't for ages, that we have such situation today.
Even if he succeeds and changes the rules of the political game, if we the people also don't change the way we think, then this can start all over again in 4 years without us even realizing.
So maybe he could do with another pair of glasses, but we the people also need another pair of glasses.
This problem is true of any candidate. The closer you look the less that seems to be there. But then again, that's when you as a voter get to weight these things as you'd like when choosing a candidate you'll support. The President of the United States is such a unique job it's really hard to know what prior experiences make one truly qualified. No matter how good the opinions or plans, actual governing is a different beast.
But there's a real treath that he can become president again. The real problem is that there's big gap in how the democrats see the world vs how republicans see the world. From the outside it's really mindblowing how differently they see and interpret the world. And the same is happening all over the world.
I don't really have that luxury in almost every situation. More often than not a candidate far surpasses anyone else in areas that are very objective to the role at hand.
Incumbents almost always win their elections. Who knows where we'll be in 4 years, but in general, an assumption that a new President-elect will serve two terms is reasonably safe.
Right, observer's bias seems important here. Being a president builds a strong brand for that person. Beyond that, being in power actually makes people more charismatic. With that, judging their charisma as candidates in retrospect hard.
Kind of like judging company names -- Apple Computers now actually seems like a good name.
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