Charm school
Scholars unpack the secrets of charisma, and suggest the elusive quality can be taught
By Mark Oppenheimer | July 20, 2008
EVEN DIEHARD REPUBLICANS can't deny that Barack Obama is the more charismatic candidate for president this year. He has shown unprecedented power to raise money and to draw crowds - from Oregon to Pennsylvania, tens of thousands have turned out to hear Obama speak. Can one imagine John McCain trying to fill a football stadium for his nomination acceptance speech, as Obama plans to do in Denver next month? Obama's crowds during the primary season were not only the biggest of all candidates, but the most enthusiastic, with the weepiest adults and the most children held aloft on shoulders.

Obama is not the first politician to have worldwide, rock-star appeal, as a January newspaper headline from Frankfurt reminds us: "Lincoln, Kennedy, Obama." Throughout history, certain people have seemed to possess an unusual, even inborn power to command attention. The Greeks called it charisma, meaning "gift," and that sums up perfectly the popular view of this trait: that it's something mysterious, not earned but given, by God or by fortunate genetics. Some people just seem to have it.

But some scholars think we can do better. Charisma, they argue, can be analyzed, understood, and broken down into parts. Some researchers are discovering that particular words or phrasings are perceived as charismatic, while others have scrutinized nonverbal cues, such as how the charismatic smile or hold their heads. Trying to understand phenomena like Barack Obama - or, in recent years, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton - they are discovering some of the secrets of the gift.

In the process, it is becoming clear that while not everybody can be an Obama, there are aspects of charisma that even the least magnetic among us might learn. For some, learning what goes into charisma might mean we'll be better able to sell cars or copier toner, while for others it might help in a race for school committee. For everyone, though, the new charisma studies offer a deeper understanding of how some famous people, whether politicians or rock stars, conjure such extraordinary appeal.

The most ambitious theory of charisma yet - a theory that helps explain all the other theories - was described last year in the book "It," by Joseph Roach, professor of English and theater studies at Yale. What people are responding to in charismatics, Roach writes, "is the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality among them." Among the people who have best embodied these contradictory qualities at the same time are King Charles II of England, Johnny Depp, Michael Jackson, and Princess Diana.

One way this embodiment of contradictions gives people charisma is when it makes them both grand and approachable. "People need to resent their idols as well as to adore them," Roach said in an interview, "tearing them down even as they build them up. People seek out figures whose personalities broadcast contradiction because they make it easier for them instantly to gratify their own contradictory needs. One of those needs is for 'public intimacy,' the assurance that the person who's not like anyone we've ever met is just like one of us after all."

Princess Diana, for example, was both royalty and a castoff from royalty, and being cast off aggravated an insecurity that made her need the people as the people needed her. "On walking into a room - whether she was visiting a prison, a hospice, or a leprosarium - she saw right away which ones needed her most, and they felt uniquely valued because she needed them," Roach writes. Those who lack Diana's contradictions, those who are as purely great or fortunate as, say, her mother-in-law, the queen, are far less charismatic.

Barack Obama embodies many contradictions. He is both black (his father) and white (his mother); from an exotic locale (by birth in Hawaii) and from a big city (by residence in Chicago); and Christian (by choice) and non-Christian (with two irreligious parents, one of them with Muslim ancestry). And surely these contradictions lend him an air of vulnerability and approachability. But Obama's contradictions don't quite make him a Diana figure. Rather, Obama shows how charisma can reside in other people's desire to figure one out. "He seems so familiar," Roach says. "But what could be more definitive of strangeness than to be running for president of the United States in 2008 with the name Barack Hussein Obama? But he holds those together. We're fascinated by the ability to hold contradictions and make them seem harmonious."

. . .

Americans are not the first people to wonder about, and be stumped by, this elusive quality. Societies throughout history have had words for the quality that Roach calls It; each word's connotations were slightly different, but each approached the same idea.

For the Roman orator Quintilian, "It was ethos, the compellingly singular character of the great orator," Roach writes. "For Castiglione, It was sprezzatura, the courtly possessor of which turned every head when he, and he alone, suavely entered a room. For many religious thinkers {hellip} It was expressed by the word charisma, a special gift vouchsafed by God, a grace or favor, which sociologist Max Weber then condensed into a principal of powerfully inspirational leadership or authority."

continued