There’s an interesting piece by Kate Zernike in today’s Times on The Charisma Mandate. Presidential historians including Robert Cato and Doris Kearns Goodwin opine on the record of such orators as FDR and LBJ — who, when he wasn’t in front of the country on TV defending a war he hardly believed in could speechify with conviction. Or at least enough conviction to get the job (ie, the Civil Rights Act) done and move others to follow his lead, which is sort of the point.

The subtext, or pretext, for the article is Obama, naturally, and the criticisms coming from both Clinton and McCain that he is all talk and no experience. Or as HRC said campaigning in Texas last week, “all hat and no cattle”, which makes for a funny image: Obama in a ten-gallon hat, like Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles, who rode into town to the sounds of Count Basie’s big band. Most of the town wanted to lynch him, you may recall.

But the cattle Clinton is talking about is experience, and maybe a wonky grasp of policy. (To counter these criticisms, Obama has been slowing his stump speech down and studding it with the political equivalent of filler, saving the all-killer routine for his victory speeches.) And while the historians quoted in Zernike’s piece warn against hubris and “the cult of personality,” most allow that you need to inspire to lead. “Politics is about policy, but it’s also about giving people some kind of sense of participating in a common venture with their fellow citizens,” says Alan Wolfe of Boston College. There’s a reason they call it a mass movement: the masses have to be moved toward the mountain. And when not being paranoid, even Clinton’s supporters admit that Obama’s mountain does not look a lot different than hers. So the question is still: who can get us there?

Goodwin, who has written biographies of presidents as diverse as Lincoln and LBJ, thinks this dilemma could be settled “if you could mush Clinton and Obama together as one person” But isn’t that what a joint ticket is for? Why not Obama-Clinton? If the debate really comes down to details versus charisma, I would argue that it is easier to add details than charisma. My wife, who has had the privilege of meeting the former First Lady, swears she is dynamic in person. It just doesn’t translate so well behind the podium, or even working the town hall meeting. Bill, when he isn’t hating Obama’s guts, has to be marveling at the kid’s moves. He is the best natural politician of our time and denying it just makes you look tone-deaf.

One of my political epiphanies came many years ago. I had volunteered to help the gubernatorial race of Tom Bradley, mayor of Los Angeles, in 1982, not because I was high on Bradley (don’t know anyone who was) but because I felt guilty for not sucking it up and voting for Carter in the presidential election of 1980. (I think I voted for John Anderson, who created his own Nader effect in that race.) Reagan was now in power and giving us a very vivid picture of just how bad a GOP presidency could be. (It would take GWB to come along years later to make the Reagan years look positively utopian in contrast.) Since I was driving a taxi for a living then, and since I was friends with some pretty girl who was working as a campaign flack for Bradley, I ended up playing chauffeur to him and his campaign manager for a day in Northern California.

It was an eye-opening afternoon. We drove from house party to house party (the last and most notable of the day was held at Francis Coppola’s estate in the Napa Valley) and I watched as the well-heeled slipped checks into the mayor’s pocket and they froze for a grip-and-grin photo. He spent the time between events poring over spread sheets and making notes (this was in the day before cell phones, remember, or else he might have been raising money as he rode as well). It wasn’t until the end of the day, when we stopped at a labor rally in the East Bay and I heard an old-fashioned, red-meat, Republican-bashing party boss get up and rouse the rabble that I realized what Bradley was missing: Charisma. The man did not have a drop of it and when he rose to speak in the larger venues, people in the back of the hall turned to talk to each other.

He lost, of course. Polls put him on the fast track to being our nation’s first black governor and the fact that some voters apparently changed their minds once they got in the voting booth has come to be referred to as The Bradley Effect, which states that white people say they’ll vote for a black politician until left to their own prejudices. The Bradley Effect was evoked when Obama lost in New Hampshire but has been called into question as he has made inroads with more white voters in the following state primaries.

That whole topic is too much for one post, obviously. My takeaway from the day I spent with Tom Bradley was that nothing replaces charisma. He lost to the equally uncharismatic GOP candidate George Deukmejian at a time when Californians were just crazy for anyone who promised not to raise their taxes. (Californians, with their failing infrastructure, collapsing schools and closed libraries are still reaping the whirlwind of their civic greed.) It seemed up close that Bradley didn’t have the fire in the belly, or any other part of him. It seemed like he was running because he had been told to, or just thought that he deserved the job. And that’s no way to run a campaign.