We'll not beat these guys out of office until we understand a simple point that I and a few other political professionals I know and have stressed for years, for me as recently as last fall with a US Senate candidate (and it fell flat, BTW): it's human qualities, stupid.

It's not the issues or positions on issues, as our Beltway idiots and CW believe and, to this very day, base their campaigns on. It's who you are as a person: honest, trustworthy, ethical, truthful, yadda, yadda. In short, voters make their decision based on the human qualities they see reflected in the candidate. They'll vote for a good, honest, strong guy even if they disagree on many issues with him.

He's right, of course, except probably for saying "many issues" -- I think there's probably a limit to the number of issues a voter and a candidate disagree about before the voter turns off that particular politician, but it's certainly true that policy is not the primary guide voters use. (Which is why I sometimes get a bit annoyed at the uber-wonkery on display at TPM Cafe or Tapped.)

The other thing that Sun Tzu doesn't say explicitly (but surely understands) is that it's not the actual, real-world qualities of a candidate that count, it's the qualities as they are presented to the voters that are important. If the presented persona is too different from the actual character of the candidate, or if the candidate is a bad performer who can't convincingly support the presented persona, the voter is going to sense something's wrong, and they won't buy it. If, however, the persona is in line with conventional wisdom about the candidate, and the candidate is able to inhabit the personal convincingly, it gets to be difficult to tear apart the belief of the voters in what they truly believe to be a "fact" about the candidate.

So, some potential lessons here:

• The better your candidate is as an actor, the more the persona you are presenting to the public can stray from the actual character of the candidate;



• The more the persona adheres to pre-existing stereotypes and preconceptions, the stronger the voters' belief in it will be;



• Conversely, the more the persona differs from received knowledge (conventional wisdom), the more important it is that the candidate either have a very powerful real-life character on which to build, or, if that's not possible, to be an extremely good performer;



• In those cases, it's not the distance of the presented persona from the actual character which is the problem, it's the distance of the presented persona from the conventional wisdom that's the rub;



• A candidate with a great character, presented with a quality persona, who's also a good actor, is a very strong candidate -- however, there's no guarantee that this combination will be any more persuasive that a candidate with a lousy character who's well-presented in line with conventional wisdom and who is a great performer.

All the more reason we should really start seriously thinking about casting our Presidential candidate.