Hillary Clinton was “shrill.” Elizabeth Warren is “wonky,” or even worse, “hectoring.” Amy Klobuchar is “mean.” Kamala Harris has (so far) escaped the media’s categorization but it’s only a matter of time. Perhaps she’ll be too “cerebral.”
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has been decreed a “folksy,” “regular guy” in much the same vein as George W. Bush was the one guy the media assured us that we would want to “have a beer with,” before he proved himself worthy of that beer by causing the pointless deaths of nearly one million Iraqi men, women and children and tanking the U.S. economy.
While Bernie Sanders has been accused of being “humorless” and “dogmatic,” those are actually qualities that tend to endear him to his constituent base. As pointed out by Claire Bond Potter, professor of history at the New School in New York City, in an op-ed appearing in the New York Times, the first openly gay (and male) Presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, is also being showered with praise by media outlets for his “authenticity.”
To be born a woman, and want to be president, it seems, you have to overcome a “likability” bias from the get-go, one that decidedly doesn’t apply to men to the same degree.
Likability: It is nebulous, arbitrary and meaningless, yet inescapable — and female politicians seem to be particularly burdened with it even when they win and especially when they run for president.
According to Potter, the emergence of “likability” as a prized trait—one seemingly valued and attributed in this country to men more than women—owes itself to the development of capitalism in the 19th Century, as “likability” became a key to a man’s success in business and the professions. Because there were few women at the time who were allowed to enjoy the rarefied environment of those smoky back rooms where business deals were bandied about, settled and agreed, our society as a whole paid far more attention to the character trait as exhibited by men.
The idea that we should like our politicians predates women’s suffrage, let alone women in politics. Pushed by Madison Avenue and preached by self-help gurus, likability is a standard that history shows us was created and sold by men. The bad news is that means it’s a tricky fit for women. The good news is that what was invented once can be reinvented.
Likability seems to have emerged as an important personality trait in the late 19th century, when it became closely associated with male business success. Before this, people liked or disliked one another, of course, but it wasn’t until after the Civil War, when middle-class men began to see virtue and character as essential to personal advancement, that success in business required projecting likability.
According to Potter, being able to get along with others (and be “liked” by them) became for many men, within the span of a few decades, a critical component to attaining success. And this phenomenon was then swiftly ingrained into the country’s culture. As mass media developed and begat mass advertising, consumers were urged and taught to crave products which created a sense of identification with someone seen as “likable.”
Popular culture too began to reflect an ethic of “likability,” from Dale Carnegie’s enormously influential “How To Win Friends and Influence People” of the 1930’s, through the spread of commercial broadcasting and filtering up through to the political culture in Dwight Eisenhower’s “I Like Ike” campaign slogan. By the 1960’s even someone as thoroughly dislikable as Richard Nixon felt compelled to modify his image as someone who could be trusted and “liked.” But likability in the political arena for decades remained a fairly entrenched domain for men, as there were simply more male politicians around.
The distinctions drawn in the 2008 Democratic Primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton offered perhaps the clearest evidence that “likability” had become the key component in assessing voter preferences. Few would dispute the impact of Obama’s charismatic and attractive personality in that primary as well as in the general elections of 2008 and 2012. But it was only in the 2016 election that the more insidious and sexist implications of this “likability” paradigm became a bit too obvious to ignore. Donald Trump was nothing if not an obnoxious, classless boor, possessed of an appallingly sexist and rude demeanor—yet voters on his side of the aisle responded to what they saw as his “authenticity.”
That’s when the inherent, sexist trap of “likability” was really laid bare, according to Potter.
Likability is associated with an emotional connection between candidate and voter that makes a politician worthy of trust. And yet because that connection is forged almost exclusively through the conduit of mass media, it can never be really about the candidate but only voters’ fantasies about how a politician they can never know ought to be. That women are disadvantaged by a dynamic that emphasizes fantasies over real achievements should perhaps come as no surprise: Popular fantasies about women, sadly, still don’t tend to feature intelligence, expertise and toughness at the negotiating table.
So a female candidate who isn’t simply a bubbly version of Gilligan’s Island’s “Mary Ann” is at a disadvantage from the start, because American culture at large still hasn’t acclimated itself to the fact that women can and do exhibit those same traits that our society has prized in men for well over 150 years. That probably goes double in more conservative enclaves of the country that still --despite all economic evidence to the contrary—gives the man the benefit of the doubt regarding his achievements and expertise. It’s one of the reasons why Fox News reflexively demonizes Democratic women like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Potter is hopeful that the emergence of women in the 2018 midterm elections, and in particular the emergence of women of color, has provided an opportunity for Americans to rethink their biases as to what really constitutes “likability,” perhaps to the point of actually redefining the term to encompass traits like reliability, competence, and trustworthiness. She hopes that Americans may finally ask themselves whether they prefer to entrust the country’s future to someone they see as “authentic,” despite glaring, even disqualifying personal defects, or to someone who can actually be trusted to get the job done and do it right.
But before that can happen, as the examples she cites from this season’s political coverage already show, the media and punditry in this country will have to develop a far greater sense of self-awareness than they currently possess.