Issues or Personality Voter?

I was channel surfing in a hotel room last week, and just happened across a lecture being given on politics. Staying with it for awhile, I was impressed with the professor's clear and concise delivery of the fundamentals of modern politics.

He gave very good and concise characterizations of the philosophies of the two major political parties, then asked the students a very insightful question:

Are you an issues voter or are you a personality voter?

Issues voters care about major issues facing the country, and seek out the candidate who most closely matches their own attitudes about those issues.

Personality voters find themselves attracted to a candidate and trust that candidate to do the right thing, but couldn't really tell anyone where that candidate stands on specific issues.

I think he's absolutely right. The so-called base of each party are issues voters. They strongly believe in a cause, and define themselves based on a set of principles embraced by their party of choice.

So most know that Republicans strongly believe in fundamental ideas like freedom, morality, a free market, and a small unobtrusive government.

Democrats, of course, are either uncomfortable with capitalism and hope to control or even punish those who dominate the free market. They don't like morality discussions, and strive to remove religion and morality from all public life. They also believe government is the solution to pretty much every problem that can be identified in the society.

How is a president chosen in most campaigns? I think by the personality voters. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, even George W. Bush were put over the top based on their personality.

Carter won over Gerald Ford because he came across as a likeable peanut farmer from the south who was as far removed from the scandals of the Nixon administration as he could be.

But Carter was a terrible president, and Reagan could have beaten him without his great personality and superior communication skill. But for Reagan's second term, he easily outshone his opponent, who was a humorless and rather dull fellow who promised to raise taxes.

Clinton repeated Carter's personality-based success, but in a different way. Clinton attracted women voters in droves with his looks and southern charm, baffling men everywhere who thought women should be offended by a guy who was a known womanizer, and most likely a predator and may have even been a rapist.

Clinton won a second term with those same women swooning and running against Bob Dole. Dole was a war hero and a genuinely nice fellow, but was aging and could not match Bill's attractiveness to the female population.

By the time George W. Bush took on Gore, enough people were weary of the constant white house scandals to narrowly choose the regular guy from Texas. And that election led to the murderous anger among the Democrat base, who think the electoral college system should not (in that election anyway) override the popular vote. That popular vote went by a statistically small margin to Gore, mostly on the strength of liberal base voters and the emergence of the "red" and "blue" state divisions so prevalent these days.

But where Bush won on personality was his second term, when he ran against the wooden, arrogant and condescending John Kerry. Even so, the red-faced conspiracy anti-war folks from the left almost succeeded in getting angry left-wing voters to the polls; not to elect Kerry, but to defeat Bush.

If the majority of Americans were issues voters instead of personality voters, I suspect our presidential choices this year would be completely different.

But speaking of personality voters, in a race between John McCain and Barack Obama, who is most likely to win?

If you don't think the answer is obvious, just ask, well, anybody.