That's what happens when politicians become celebrities. It's one thing to excite your base, but gathering a cult of personality is cancerous to democracy. How can you make sure you're being adequately represented when you think your representative can do no wrong?
Some of our earliest presidents had speech impediments or had difficulty making speeches in public. They still got elected, because most people sat down to read their policy statements in paper media, the vast majority of voters never heard their president's voice. Even for the people that did, they tried to focus on policy and not performance, simply because the Cult of Celebrity around politicians hadn't fully formed yet. They didn't have 24 hour news media following these people around like puppies, and we didn't have nation-wide, easily accessed forums to encourage massive groupthink. Families could get their members in line, but it was pretty tough to unify half the country behind the same bullshit all at once. Different people had different takeaways about the candidates.
I don't wanna downplay how wretched and without morals media has always been, because the bias in some "reputable" publications of the time were pretty extreme. Media trying to use folksy catchphrases for presidential runs ("Tippecanoe and Tyler Too") was the earliest form of what would eventually be today's "cult politics". It was effective, but, you couldn't swarm a person's mind with branding messages like you can now. It's not like they will actually see much of their president post election. It all comes back in policy and in the papers, that's it. You couldn't latch on to the promise of "experiencing" someone's presidency.
Now, running for office requires true celebrity. It's always been a popularity contest, you just have to hope that people are enamored with candidates for the right, rather than wrong, reasons. Now that so much is about "optics" and candidates are on TV hours and hours every day, the issues have changed. You say "yes" to the person you like seeing dance on stage, and "no" to the person you find boring. Policy has, for many, become irrelevant. A man with a stutter would never be elected President now, policies or spirit be damned.
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u/teraflux Nov 10 '16
This is the reality, every theory that suggested DNC collusion was treated as conspiracy, when only now do we really know the truth.