Andrew Bolt said something on last week’s Insiders that caught my attention. Although Bolt can be an arrogant and reactionary pundit, his criticisms do occasionally hit the mark. He said that a lot of left wingers are using Rudd’s charisma (or whatever it is, his je ne sais qua) “to project an attitude, like IR, of policies to come. But there’s really very little in the cupboard.”
And yesterday, Hartcher seemed likewise fascinated as to what attracted voters to Rudd:
And as Australia’s most popular opposition leader in the 35-year history of the ACNielsen poll strolled the Westfield Garden City mall in Brisbane’s working-class Upper Mount Gravatt, he was approached by a large woman with warm wishes.
“Mr Rudd, I believe you are going to be our next prime minister,” she told him. The Labor leader asked her why she thought so. “It’s just your charisma,” she replied.
Rudd and some of his entourage of staff members laughed. “That’s the least believable thing I’ve heard all day,” was his rejoinder. He can be self-deprecating, but this time he was also being realistic.
Rudd is not a charismatic figure. He does not radiate the personal magic, the captivating aura of a John F. Kennedy or a Mahatma Gandhi or even a Hawke in his political prime. He does not achieve the Harvard anthropologist Charles Lindholm’s definition: “Charisma is, above all, a relationship, a mutual mingling of the inner selves of leader and follower.”
Dame Edna Everage captures the impression that we have of Rudd’s inner self: “Do we want a prime minister who looks like a dentist?” she asks audiences in her show, Back with a Vengeance, to much laughter. Her other line on Rudd is to wonder whether Australia is ready for a leader named Kevin.
But Rudd certainly has something. His poll numbers are not only stratospheric, they are persistently so….
….What is it about Kevin, or St Kevin as some have called him in recognition of his halo of popular approval? And is it enough to take power from Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister at the election expected within five months?
My concern is different to Hartcher. I’m not worried about whether Rudd’s charisma will be enough to win him the election. I’m worried about whether his charisma is really masking a paucity of ideas, vision and policy. I’m worried at how much Rudd’s evocation of stability and strength may merely mask the usual boring and conservative views.
This leads on from some of the concerns in my previous post. When it comes to the crunch, Rudd is being vague or even retractive on the things that matter (IR and climate change specifics) and strong and forceful on the things that don’t matter – that is, the things that make him less distinctive (indifference to unions, economic conservatism). In this context, Rudd’s image of strength is not that of political courage or will but a forceful insistence on remaining the same – the primary indicator of weakness. If Rudd’s ‘charisma’ is going to help him win the election it’ll be because it functions as the ‘empty signifier’ able to safely contain the multitude of interests.
With the election only five months away, Rudd needs to invoke a radical break from the current political dialetic. Bring back politics proper in all its singular, divisive glory. If not, he’s going to find himself increasingly ripe for Howard’s political synthesis.
