2008 and popularity

I want to call your attention to an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor entitled "Wrong way to judge a candidate: We need leadership, not 'likemanship.'". The title pretty much tells it all but here's part of what it says anyway:

With Election Day 2008 more than a year-and-a-half off, already the presidential campaign is – sigh – energetically under way.

And already – groan – we hear the media discuss it as a popularity contest. As in 2000 and 2004, the media are at it again: Candidates are rated for "likability." Once again, we Americans are asked: With whom would we rather hang out? Once again, extraneous factors such as voice (Hillary Clinton's) and lack of hair (Rudy Giuliani's) are noted and mocked.

By these superficial measures, President Bush's perceived affability trumped the stiffness of Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry in the 2000 and 2004 elections. And look what it got us: a president who leaves an abysmal record that even many Republicans disavow.

Because of that record, America at present is caught in what poet W.H. Auden called a "night full of wrong." Given this unhappy state, why on earth would the media revive the high-school standard of leadership? And, apologies to the nation's responsible teenagers, but, developmentally, it's the adolescent who obsesses about and calibrates likability.

Yet likability and desirability as a lunch pal – key tests for some voters – are again echoed by the media on all sides: mainstream and new, on the left and right, in hip venues and in those trying hard to be. And already, all are applying this test to rate winners and losers. Who gave the media the authority to preselect our candidates?
...
To chart our way upward, we need character, vision, strategic thinking, sobriety, and the antique quality of virtue in our leaders. Moreover, the next president must possess the maturity both to repair what may have been broken by today's administration and to cede power back to the legislative and judicial branches, recalibrating what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called "the imperial presidency." The 2008 election begs not for "likemanship," but for leadership.

I agree, of course.