Opinion | How Charismatic Can a Moderate Politician Be?

Bret, you made a great point about how much more difficult charisma is in the center or for a centrist than it is for someone else. I think there may be an opportunity right now for that to be not true. I think Americans, those who are not spending all their lives on social media, are so tired of the temperature of our political discourse, are so tired of the melodrama of American political life that I think a centrist who was poetic and charismatic about the desire to heal, the desire to turn down the temperature, the desire to create a space that may not match everybody’s political preferences but that is a space in which we can actually live amicably and get some minor stuff done, find some compromises so that we have incremental progress, as opposed to utter sclerosis — I think that could be a charismatic pitch.