As Hillary Clinton faces the two crucial primaries in her run for the Democratic Party nomination, pundits seem to have reached a consensus that her campaign is flat- lining. Blame has been cast all over, from her greatest asset turned liability, Bill, to her costly and clueless advisers, the trigger-happy staff, and finally onto Hillary herself: she’s just not likable enough, she’s too calculating, wants to win too badly, she’s been planning this for too long, trying too hard, looking too desperate…the list is long.

Elections are popularity contests writ large. No other race embodies this fact more prominently than the American presidential contest. Who would have thought that Barack, a product or racial and cultural admixture, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii well outside the US mainstream, would ever become a plausible presidential candidate! It seemed like the democratic roster was stuck between a likable candidate who wasn’t winnable, and a winnable candidate wasn’t all that likable. But Obama has definitely proved the pundits wrong, at least as far as the primaries are concerned, he’s winning because he is likable and Hillary is losing because she is not. Likability is her brick wall. The heart overrides the mind all too often for us mere humans, sometimes we can’t help who we like, and voting is an emotional act as much as it is a rational one. Of course it doesn’t help that while lacking “experience” Barack is just as smart and credentialled as she is. He is easy to like and easy to vote for.

The main question I have though is whether the issue of likability can become a no-win trap for female presidential candidates in the US. Women are fainting at Obama’s rallies and it’s not from the crowdedness or the heat alone. Gail Collins from the NYT points out:

Contrary to rumor, he is not planting those people who faint from excitement at his rallies. Nevertheless, they continue to topple, and by now Barack is so used to this particular crisis that it has become almost a part of the rally routine. “If we have an E.M.T. in the house, I think somebody got faint,” he said calmly when a woman keeled over in front of the stage in Cincinnati. “They just need a little water and some juice.”

Check out Obama’s own narration of these incidents at various rallies:

http://www.breitbart.tv/html/48404.html

Wall Street Journal’s article We Shall Be Overcome is quite entertaining:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110011130

Charisma, that ineffable star quality, is key to rendering unconventional candidates palatable to the general public (see JFK vis a vis Catholicism). However would sheer charisma be an asset for a woman the way it is for a man? This whole fainting business I think encapsulates the catch-22 that any female presidential candidate would face. Obama’s charisma is an unadulterated good for his campaign. The more women that faint at his rallies the better. Men want to be him, women want to be with him. But imagine if men were catcalling and serenading Hillary at her rallies. For a woman who attempts to run for arguably the most high status job in the world, there is a such a thing as being too attractive, too distractingly beautiful for the all too serious job. A successful female candidate has to be likable in a particular way without being too likable. She must avoid sexualization and fit herself into the matronly mold without being perceived as a boring scold. Seems next to impossible to me as a winning formula in the American context. A male candidate however does not need to worry about all that, he can be a hunk, a brainiac and “presidential” enough to be commander in chief. Basically, he can have it all.

So as long as a qualified and smart woman like Hillary is running against a somewhat less qualified, just as smart, rockstar candidate like Obama, the ending seems unlikely to be a happy one for her. If she is however running against a mere human male then her chances might become a tad more favorable. The odds stacked against Hillary are fundamentally more daunting than those against Barack. Charm and charisma allow people to look past his blackness and his “other” ness. Lack of charisma all but dooms Hillary. However, even if Hillary had boatloads of charm and charisma unless she could modulate it just right, she as a woman would surely risk being categorized in less than flattering ways by the general public and the media.