Prez Lincolm was an ungly man who talked monotone.  He didn’t put a long tv show on and he won.  Donny Dosh is shallow ego Lib.  Dems love candidates, Repubs get in line with the party.  One is emotion, one substance.

this is madness !
mr. donny is smartest guy on this tv station.

Deutch is 100% right that likability is a factor in selecting a president and Roemer conceded the point. Where exactly is the “tangle”?

Lincoln wasn’t around in the era of television, cable news, & youtube.

Obama won without having taken a position on any number of positions and without having any significant history (in fact most of his past has remained hidden).  I think that proves his point.  Hillary was not only qualified from being in government (as spouse or Senator) since the 70′s.   Steve Schmidt’s advice to suspend McCain’s campaign when the financial crisis broke made him look like a chicken with his head cut off, I think Barney Frank might have even stood a chance against him.

 So, they fooled you, too.

 Which is your native language?

Ya, but Hoover was.

Yours truly, Joe Biden

Buddy was frustrated that in spite of his millions of reasons to change the system, Donny was able to describe the key to a democracy in simple terms. It’s basically a popularity contest. Squares don’t win popularity contests. The most exciting thing about Mitt Romney is that he’s a part of the LDS movement. Wow, that’s as exciting as plain cream of wheat with water on the side.

Deutch brings nothing to the conversation other than the fact that he is a Marketing guy. We all get that. And yes he was trivializing it. Roemer is correct.

Go ahead & make this about Joe Biden because Biden doesn’t care and neither does anyone else.

When we were going through the Whitney Houston Mourn-a-Thon, I was struck again at how charisma is not universally perceived. Ms. Houston obviously had a number of people who she simply electrified, some who were offended by her and some, like me, who simply found her rather derivative, redundant and mediocre. In my lifetime, we have had three (3) charismatic presidents, Kennedy, Clinton and Obama. Kennedy’s charm was vicarious for me. I was young, and I merely observed his effect upon the adults around me. Clinton was amazing to me. I was never a huge Clinton fan on policy matters. He was far too conservative. But, he could come into a room, and the air seemed to have left the room. He could begin talking, and you became convinced he was talking only to you. Obama’s charm is something like Clinton’s for me. I am not by nature an Obama fan on many policy issues. He is, after all, more conservative than Clinton. But, he differs. He enters a room, and you do not feel particularly engaged. He finally ignites a spark, and, over time, it flames. He is like a good Protestant preacher. The ideas build. The plot moves to a climax, and you’re left completely engaged. There is no denouement.

Of course charismatic people inspire passion in many, and create dislike in others. There is always an intense reaction, however. No one is unaffected. Still, there is great value in that. Political value. People are moved. Leadership value. People follow.

While President Obama invites passion, Willard kills it. It is the antithesis of passion. That doesn’t make him a bad person. In fact, these periods of passionate leadership leave us searching for our breath. We are collectively worn out. Then, comes a rather dull and dreary, sometimes dim-witted successor. I certainly include Willard in the dull and dreary category, although he is not dim-witted. Willard’s problem is not something inherently wrong with him, it’s that his timing is off. He would have been an able albeit dull and dreary successor to Clinton. In 2016 someone of his personality type might be an able successor to President Obama, but Willard’s shelf life seems to have run.

But Obama took strong positions on many of the issues that mattered most to voters, including his opposition to the war in Iraq (a position he was on record with from the beginning) and his belief in a more equitable tax code (even though his opponents tried to tag that as socialism).

And for what it’s worth, while suspending his campaign obviously contrasted badly with Obama’s “we have to be able to do more than one thing at a time” rallying cry, it was McCain’s selection of the neophyte Palin that ultimately did him in.

You know, democratic centrism is a leninist concept.

I will never understand why anyone asks Donny Deutch’s opinion on these kind of things. The man is very poorly informed and tends to take as shallow a look at this kind of issue as possible. He seems nice enough but please stop trying to make him ‘happen’ NBC

I suppose it makes sense that those who think the Tea Party is motivated by racist issues with the President instead of deep economic concerns also think the electing of a President is all about superficial pop instead of substance. Note to Donny:  there really are people out here who are more concerned about the futures of our families and our country.

It always amazes me to hear people try to claim Obama is more conservative than anyone, let alone centrist Clinton!  If you use the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he inherited as your reasoning, he hobbled those efforts from the beginning with an eye of pulling out.  Clinton had different realities to deal with, he didn’t come in to office entrenched in two wars.  Obama has been getting out just about as fast as he can, at the expense of many lives of troops who haven’t been allowed to protect themselves.  That’s a policy decision and its his to make, he is The Decider after all, something liberals derided Bush for being in his two terms.  We’ve all but abandoned Iraq and are in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan.  On social issues Obama is so far to the left as to make Clinton look far right, so I just can’t imagine how any centrist or right of centrist could take seriously the claim Obama is to the right of Clinton.  I think to convince someone of that they’d have to be to the left of Dennis Kucinich, which is far left indeed.

Donny hits the nail on the head about how Obama got elected. Obama was elected as a celebrity/rock star not as an executive. Libs fell in love with his good looks, that he was cool and his family was young and cool and the fact that he would be the first black president was an added bonus. There was no media scrutiny of his past which shaped his philosophy, no scrutiny that he never really accomplished anything and thats why we’re in this mess. If I was interviewing someone for a CEO position, I dont want cool/rock start, I want a resume that shows a hard worker, someone who has experience running and succeeding in large complex situations. Mitt Romney is that guy and for everyone to say he wont get elected because he is not exciting or a rock star is really a sad comment on our country.

I agree – he’s not qualified to discuss ANYTHING on ANY news network outside of a fluff piece discussing the Super Bowl Commercials. The man is an andvertising executive and NOTHING else.

Personality adulation is a very poor substitute for character, values, and substance.

Very poor.  Ask any European who survived WWII.

Your mindset, shared by tens of millions, terrifies most of us.  

You hit the nail on the head. When it comes to presidential candidates, dems vote with their “feelings”. Never mind the issues and policies, that you yourself just disagreed with, but as long as you have a nice “feeling” about the candidate, you support him. That is why dem candidates who are bland (Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Hillary) lose. The base only supports “rock star” types. Dems only vote “feelings” and for the next rock star.Otherwise, they stay home. It would be nice if dem voters looked to vote on the issues instead of the person that gets their collective juices flowing.