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Can you give more detail on an example? I havent met any top-brass, but so far thats not my impression.
Hard to do more recent ones for opsec reasons, but as a schoolkid on a school newspaper I once somehow (fun story in itself, but unfortunately also an opsec issue) got to interview Otto Schily, then-minister of interior of Germany. Being your run-of-the-mill vaguely anarchy-sympathising student, I considered him a natural enemy, and he spouted nothing but the tritest platitudes on the subject of the interview, but I was enthralled in more or less exactly the LotR way (Wow. This kindly old man is so likeable. Surely he has $problem under control. I should just listen and thank him. Everything will be all right.) and completely failed to even try to question the non-answers. After it ended, I looked over my notes, reflected on the incongruous feeling that can only be described as afterglow, and wondered wtf just happened.
Hm. Any theories on why it happens in person, but not hearing them otherwise?
Apart from some really out-there ones like unusually agreeable pheromones, my best guess would be that it involves rapport-building body language. There are at least two schools of analysing and optimising microexpressions to control another person's impression of you (police interrogators and pick-up artists), starting with trickery like "mimic their posture" or "cross your legs so that the upper of the legs points towards them" that is not particularly subtle but already below the level of what someone not deliberately paying attention would notice. If any of this is effective, it would make sense to me if top politicians are pretty heavily selected for natural aptitude at it. As with the two "trickery" examples, the most effective tricks may require physical presence and attuning to an individual target.
I guess Im surprised that this worked on someone like you. Im a bit unsure if my own weirdness is more autistic or sociopathic, maybe that has something to do with it.
It would certainly help, but a lot of politics is also about doing well in impersonal interactions, more so the higher you go. Where you would really expect a lot of this is someone who sells things, but at a high enough level that you wouldnt just call him a salesman. Maybe someone like Trump.
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I was very good friends with a girl who was a die hard, life-long Democrat. Like, door-to-door campaigning in middle school, joking about how much she'd like to be Bill Clinton's intern in the mid-00s, etc. I went to college with her and she spent her days preparing to be Leslie Knope and tangling with [famous conservative firebrand]. Her first real job in politics was somehow as an intern for a red state Republican senator, and she came back absolutely gushing about him. They had fun chats and he gave her a cute pet name and everything!
I was just flabbergasted. "Senator [recognizable name]? Neocon, evangelical fundamentalist, anti-gay, anti-abortion, Iraq War-supporting Senator [recognizable name]? I'm not mixing him up with some other Senator [recognizable name]?"
And she'd just cheerfully go "Yeah, him! Great guy."
Voice of Saurman is a solid analogy.
Even famously poor charisma politicians like Al Gore will totally eat the ego of an average person, especially if the meeting is accompanied by the accoutrements.
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