Reply #30: Because having good policies is half the battle [View All]

Dennis Kucinich has great policies. He will never be President. And even if by some miracle he is defaulted the position, he will get little done.

Because like or not in politics and in business charisma matters. The ability to inspire people, to bargain with people, to make people see your way is almost if not more important than having the right policy in the first place.

No one doubts Hillary's grasp of policy. What they doubt is her ability to get anything done with it. She had a great Health Care policy and a Democratic Congress in 1992, and still managed to get absolutely nowhere with it (and indeed, set it back for decades) because she had no idea how to inspire people to take a chance on something so radical, to build a groundswell of support behind it, to assemble a coalition of Congresspeople and the popular sentiment to support it and actually push it through.

I doubt she would have any hope of even getting her silly Gas Tax through, and that is peanuts compared to HealthCare or ending the war.

And she still doesn't know how to do that. This campaign is "Exhibit B: How to squander a 30+% lead in the national vote, the media support, every major Elite Dems backing and a massive bankroll to lose to a relatively unknown 1st term junior Senator." She simply doesn't have the appeal, the trust factor, the ability to make people want to take a stand that Obama has demonstrated.

The fact is outside of the Clinton base, there is no support for her. The Clinton's have made enemies up and down the political line for decades. The Republican politicians despise her if for no other reason because their base demands they do.

Not saying Obama does have huge cross-party support, but he has the ability to create it. You just don't manufacture 1.5 million donors with pretty speeches. You do it by being able to inspire, to see a different viewpoint, to instigate action.

To lead.

And isn't that what we ultimately want from our President?

That's the crux for me. Hillary is ultimately not a leader. She may be smart. She may know policy inside and out. But she is not someone who, as Tom Landry the old coach of the Cowboys once put it "gets people to do what they don't want to do in order to succeed." Because that is Leadership.

You may disagree and that's fine, but there is the main point for me.