The likeability trap

How often during the current season have we heard that Mitt Romney just isn’t likable? Sure, he’s smart, successful, a good family man, a thoroughly decent guy, but we just don’t like him all that much. …

The economy is tanking, but he’s a nice guy — more likable than Romney by 50 percent to 30 percent, according to the poll. Forty-one percent said they believe Obama “understands people like me.” Only 28 percent said the same about Romney. …

This ridiculous matrix for assessing a candidate’s qualifications for office is the inevitable offspring of the cultural coupling of narcissism and attention-deficit disorder, otherwise defined as an inability to think for more than two minutes about anything more complicated than oneself. …

All these reminiscences were aimed, of course, at being “likable,” as though we need our leaders to have been poor or to have struggled in some pedestrian way. Anyone who has taken a breath has struggled, if not always financially. As Ann Romney told me in an interview not long ago, “We couldn’t be doing this if we weren’t successful.”