Lets face it, Americans elect folksy presidents. For the past 30 years, every man who's graced the Oval Office has been incredibly folksy, the kind of guy America wants to sit down with and drink a beer.
Even the least folksy of the bunch, George H.W. Bush, was still pretty folksy. He beat the pants off Michael Dukakis, a man with no folk, and lost to Bill Clinton, the guy who played saxophone on "Arsenio" and sported the nickname of "Bubba."
It doesn't get any folksier than that.
Look at our other recent presidents. The current George Bush speaks in an semi-affected Texas accent (he was born in Connecticut, went to school in Massachusetts and college at Yale). He vacations on a ranch and playfully massages the back of the German chancellor. He clobbered the sweaty, stuffy, snowboarding John Kerry, and narrowly beat (maybe) Al Gore. And while Gore has undergone a personal transformation to eco-folkiness, in 2000, he was branded a wine and cheesy intellectual who claimed he invented the Internet. Not folksy, folks.
Before Clinton, we had the folksiest of all presidents, Ronald Reagan, a cuddly old cowboy who was so affable and reassuring that he pulled off a tall tale about the Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a "Star Wars," and no even asked him if he was telling the truth.
Of course, Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed nuclear physicist who also happened to be a very folksy peanut farmer. Carter trounced Gerald Ford, a very unfolksy guy who wound up in office under unusual circumstances. And so on and so on.
Now, I do write from some personal and professional experience, despite the Talbacker who remarked in my Sarah Palin blog that I had no political acumen. In addition to a dozens political science classes en route to my international affairs degree from George Washington University, I worked on both Capitol Hill and in the White House in 1996. The latter was in the Office of Presidential Letters and Messages as a ghostwriter for President Clinton. I wrote more than 100 letters on Clinton's behalf, and every one of them needed to be penned in his "voice." We studied books of his correspondence, as well as letters from Bush and Reagan to learn the appropriate level of schmaltz to pour on, and it was really high. So high that I packed my bags and moved to Milwaukee after college, disenchanted by all the rhetoric and none of the action coming from Washington, D.C.
More recently, I spent two hours with George Bush when he visited OnMilwaukee.com in 2005. We chatted in my office and published an article together. We rode to the Art Museum in his limo, and I had the opportunity to talk with him on a personal level like most Milwaukeeans have not. Politics aside, he was a genuinely nice guy as we chatted about family, baseball and our life as entrepreneurs. In other words, Dubya is folksy as hell.
Now, Americans will choose between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama is young, energetic, an excellent public speaker and like most of the country, staunchly opposed to the war in Iraq. But he's the farthest thing from folksy. He comes off cocky and polished to the point that some have even questioned if he's "black enough," whatever that means.
McCain is old, sleepy on stage and looks uncomfortable delivering a speech. He points and shrugs and winks and looks like he'd rather be having the conversation from a barstool. Maverick or otherwise, he represents the party that the majority of Americans say they are ready to boot out of the White House. But the former prisoner of war is damned folksy.
I watched both McCain and Obama deliver their convention speeches. I think most people would agree with me that if we had to choose a candidate to drink a beer with, it would be McCain. Regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics, no one is going to call McCain "evil," though he does need to watch out for the negativity creeping into his campaign messages, as "folksy" and "bitter" go together like oil and water.
So the question is whether Americans are afraid of intellectuals. Do they want someone they can relate to, even if they disagree on the issues? Or do they want someone who might be smarter than they are running the country?
Do they want someone who shares their morality, or do they concede that louts like John F. Kennedy and Clinton might've been sleezeballs on a personal level, but were good presidents in office?
And do they consider that what they see in carefully-orchestrated TV appearances might not be reality, either: both Obama and McCain have reputations for hair-trigger tempers, and how many of today's megalomaniac politicians have remained faithful to their spouses? The answer is fewer than we think. Clinton actually smoked those Cuban cigars on Air Force One. McCain and Bush drop the "f bomb" with reckless abandon. Obama is almost certainly still smoking cigarettes. These are real people with real personal lives, regardless of how their handlers want us to see them.
Personally, I think charisma is a little overrated, and I want the smartest president who agrees with me on the issues that I find important. I'm not a Democrat or a Republican, and I reserve the right to vote for the best person for the job, regardless of political affiliation.
Folksiness goes a long way for making feel warm and fuzzy, and listening to McCain's war stories last night really touched me. But at the end of the day, the folksy factor places a distant second behind my confidence that a candidate can do a good job leading the country.
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
