It's the personality, stupid!

Harris is doing reasonably well, but to have better chances of winning she'll need to summon up, learn or fake true charisma. Or even learn the power of oratory.

When you’re in the presence of a great orator, you just know. It's an unmistakable energy that sweeps across a room – a sense that the speaker not only controls the message but owns the moment. From the calculated eloquence of Barack Obama to the folksy charm of Bill Clinton and the actorly cadence of Ronald Reagan, history shows it can win elections.

And I’m here to tell the Democrats that Kamala Harris is not yet proving she has it – and that’s it’s a pretty big reason why her lead in the polls is paper-thin and she might lose on Nov. 5 to a blustering charlatan who talks nonstop rubbish in a bizarrely compelling way. If the Democrats want to win, they need to celebrate less the fact that they’re competitive again, and teach her how to be an effective speaker.

This is not to suggest that Harris would make a bad president. I do not mean to take her down and certainly support her over Trump, who is one of the few candidates so odious on a personal level that policies can plausibly become a distant consideration.

Indeed, rhetorical skill and charisma in general have little to do with formulating sound policy — and often don’t go together (same as a journalist must be good at talking to people, analyzing situations, and writing coherently – all basically unrelated). And when they don’t, for politicians as for journalists, a special effort is needed – to learn the part that’s missing, to fake it or to overcome the absence of  it.

Consider President Joe Biden, for instance. Biden is a statesman with decades of experience, but he hasn’t exactly swept the nation off its feet – and it’s not due to his dotage or childhood stutter. Hillary Clinton, too, was (despite her off-putting dynasticism) an accomplished politician with deep policy knowledge, but her speeches felt stiff, calculated, and cautious.

In contrast, Trump, with his grammar-defying, logic-bending, and often wildly offensive rants, knows how to tap into something visceral. He doesn’t win hearts and minds through reasoned argument or elevated discourse but through raw emotion and an uncanny knack for connecting with his base on a primal level. He’s inarticulate, boorish, ignorant, incurious and simplistic – and infuriating to anyone who values coherence and fact-based argument – but he has an undeniable bizarro-world charisma.

The Democrats continue to underestimate this in not ensuring their recent candidates are up to the task, on the charisma side.