“Politics is show business for ugly people,” as the aphorism goes.
Indeed.
These people love the limelight. A lot of them would have loved to be Hollywood actors, but lacked the charisma and physical aesthetic.
So they went to law school or clawed their way through some labyrinthine bureaucracy to the top or whatever they had to do to get some attention to themselves.
Here we have Exhibit A, the rebuttal to the non-State of the Union address from President Trump by “retired” CIA agent and current Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin. Chuck Schumer evidently handpicked her for her alleged charisma.
It takes her all of 18 seconds to mention that she was in New York on 9/11, ergo, she’s a patriot you should trust... or something. She then proceeds to aggrandize herself with an extensive autobiography that no one cares about or asked for.
Related: Physician: Libs Experiencing ‘9/11-Style’ Trauma After MAGA Takeover
Both sides indulge in identity politics and personal narratives to sell themselves, but the Democrats are the most prolific in this regard.
We might recall echoes in Slotkin’s speech of the notorious mentally ill (by her own description) CIA latinx who made a two-and-a-half-minute commercial for the agency without ever actually talking about anything but herself.
Related: HuffPo Feminist Quits Shaving to Protest for Abortion Rights
For nearly all of these people, platitudes and intersectional box-ticking is all they have. Years of serving as neoliberal sock puppets have sucked all of their substance dry, to the extent they ever had any in the first place.
Bernie Sanders, whatever one thinks about the substance — before he was quietly neutered off-stage and became a shell of his former self — captured the zeitgeist in 2015-16 by speaking to the pain and suffering of the electorate that had wallowed under neoliberalism for decades. He notoriously bristled at questions of a personal nature and quickly pivoted to talking about the issues that people care about. Again, his solutions may have been hit or miss but the focus on the voter is what so many found compelling enough to pack out stadiums.
The only figure who trumped, if you will, the campaign numbers that Bernie brought out was Donald Trump who, in his own way, also spoke to the bread-and-butter issues that Americans cared about. Contrary to popular belief, their appeal to non-ideological voters was very similar.
Of course, Donald Trump enjoys talking about himself and certainly is not lacking in ego. However, the key distinction between him and the vast majority of politicians, especially Democrat ones, in this regard is that he’s almost always talking about himself in the context of wins he’s delivered on behalf of the American people — i.e., “I’m such a great businessman, look at the trade deal I got for you.” That’s a huge difference that voters appreciate. He’s not lecturing; he’s not preaching; he’s not waxing poetic on his “lived experience”; he’s delivering and telling you all about it.Often, the ones that look the best on the casting couch — Rep. Dan Crenshaw, for instance, the former NAVY Seal who has the well-curated aesthetics of a solid, battle-hardened conservative — turn out to be the swampiest Benedict Arnold RINOs of them all. Hence the well-earned nickname, “Eyepatch McCain.”
The 1990s glad-handing, greaseball “American Psycho” PR shtick simply doesn’t work anymore.
