Dawn Ritch, Columnist

They say that personality isn't everything, but it's certainly a lot. Take politics for example. It helps a great deal to have personality. Indeed, a political leader must be larger than life. This is a calling as ancient as man, and descended from the warrior class. No shrinking violet ever succeeded to political office except by the untimely death of the previous occupant, who was unlikely to have been a shrinking violet himself.

This is not to suggest that political leaders should not be thoughtful. Only that they shouldn't be caught at it. The very sight of it makes those who are ruled feel irritable and resentful, because they don't even have time to scratch their own heads.

Thoughtful politicians, those who make an exaggerated pretence of thinking and talking about the issues of the day, are downright bores. Go to any party and they're always the wall flowers, or the ones with the people steadily drifting away from them.

A sure sign of abject political failure is the politician who sits in the middle of a gathering in lonesome splendour, and still no one goes over to greet him. Such a politician might as well retire to a rocking chair.

Whether or not they want to hug him or quarrel with him, a politician is required to draw public attention wherever he goes. Otherwise it becomes a little like dragging the embalmed corpse of Stalin around with you on the campaign trail.

Jamaicans hate 'sour face'

Personality isn't everything. It is however, a good place to start. Edward Seaga holds the dubious distinction as leader of the Jamaica Labour Party of winning only one general election to the House of Parliament. I am convinced this was because he mastered the knack of appearing distant in public. Jamaicans do not like what we call 'sour face'. It's the one thing we can't stand. Anything is preferable to a 'sour face', except murder, and even that comes pretty close.

Not all the achievements in the world and orderly government could mask the fact that no one could get a smile out of Edward Seaga. Maybe he thought he had a silly smile, or a sneering one, I don't know. It must be said, however, that a caring smile is an indescribable advantage to any politician. He can't succeed without it. That is not charisma, that is charm.

Charisma is the power to convince people to follow your leadership, to do as you do. And that's another exceptional quality.

Political leaders are not made by a cookie cutter. No matter how much the marketing people may wish to pretend otherwise, the bald fact is that some individuals are just not suited to the task. Circumstances can never be advantageous.

The first inviolable rule of politics is that a politician must attract, rather than repel. Any candidacy without this feature is needlessly expensive and inevitably short-lived - as long as it's a democracy, anyway.

Indeed, such candidates don't normally get to first base, except by the long and unhappy route of interminable compromise. By the end of all that screwing up, the politician has a tightly coiled face like an old sugar bun. It's a very hard sale to make, and not worth the effort.

But a huge amount of effort goes into it nevertheless. A frantic attempt is therefore made to get a heedless public to focus on non-issues,instead of personality. It doesn't work. These so-called issues are so endless that nobody can remember them, much less bother to think about them.

This is an unnatural harness into which no heads ought to be placed. We all know already that the identification of the 'issues' is merely a public beheading of action. We've seen it over and over again. This is a game for fanatics and extremists and no one bothers to watch.

Take the Sandals Whitehouse matter. The Opposition-chaired Public Accounts Committee of the House of Parliament can't remember what the nature of their investigation is. Now they say they're going to take a good while longer before they get to the bottom of whatever it is. And after the relevant parties can be found to attend the sittings again.

Monumental waste of time

The public money that has been spent investigating Sandals Whitehouse could have trained all the rivers and emptied all the gullies in Jamaica. It seems a monumental waste of time and treasure to me, especially since the matter was already before the court, which is paid and trained to decide these things.

Her Majesty's loyal Opposition is of course, not likely to agree with me. But it must be said that they're dragging their feet on Whitehouse, and wasting taxpayer funds with abandon. One forensic audit was done. They want another one. And no conclusion is yet in sight.

If the parliamentarians can't remember what it was about, what hope can the public possibly have of remaining in the picture? This is the inherent failure of all issue politics - fatigue, even outright boredom.

There isn't a political budget in the world that can support outright boredom, nor one big enough to combat voter fatigue. Strategists who try to put the public back in school do so at their peril.

There really is such a thing as a glass slipper in politics, and only Cinderella gets to wear it. None of the Ugly Sisters. The coach may turn to a pumpkin at midnight, but she marries the prince and lives happily ever after.

People have aright to expect that their leaders are not only charismatic, but decisive and able, short of which, they may as well retire to the rocking chair.