The Diabolical Charm Factor

Bill Weld is a funny guy. He tells good stories. Remembers names. The man doesn’t blink when listening to morons blather at cocktail parties. He’ll touch your arm, laugh at your jokes, hold your door. In short, he’s a good flirt. He’s actually a super-charming, personable “nice guy.” He had to use these talents to work with heavily Democratic Beacon Hill.

Edward Cox is by all accounts as great a guy. He’s one of those multi-national oil industry corporate lawyers who volunteers with enough charitable institutions so that buried under the feel-good extracurriculars, his actual occupation gets short shrift in his bio. He is Chair of the New York State Council of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and is a member of the executive committees of the New York League of Conservation Voters Education Fund and the National Stroke Association. And then, squeezed into the last paragraph, one learns he also just happens to sell Middle East oil and buy Argentina’s oil fields.

In a perfect world a politician’s charm should be in direct proportion to their level of empathy for the least among us. Instead, these nice guys are Republicans and it’s diabolical.

Gandhi would have been as lovable as Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant’s love child sprinkled with the coolness of Brad Pitt. And conversely, Josef Stalin would have looked like one of the Hutts. Only an enormous drooling slug could have instituted the pogroms, Siberian death camps and genocides that killed 20 million Russians over a 30 year reign of terror.

No doubt they’re nice. If these really sweet, charming people get into office they’ll receive talking points and get brow beaten into backing policies dreamed up by men who should look like deformed monsters.