Wellsangels

Reading Westen’s ideas about the primacy of emotion in determining political attachments and behavior, it was hard not to think about how the conflict between emotion and reason that he describes was playing out on the national stage—not, this time, in the classic Republican vs. Democrat standoff, but between the two Democratic candidates for president, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Almost as soon as the Clinton campaign detected the reality of Obama’s challenge—somewhere between Iowa and New Hampshire—they began characterizing the race as between a policy wonk and a candidate whose soaring rhetoric captured people’s attentions but ultimately meant little, a characterization that was intuitively easy for Clinton supporters and got a lot of play.

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