Because, in Romney’s case, say some Democrats, Republicans are an unfeeling people generally, not truly mammals but more like giant lizards whose fear-and-aggression-based throwback nervous systems render them dangerously susceptible to crude Darwinian dominance displays. That, or they were pummeled into submission by the candidate’s well-stuffed moneybags. Obama is sure to make both these arguments. The president’s entire re-election effort is founded on the notion that Romney is numb, uncaring, and out-of-touch because his party and its ideas are too, and on the faith that the electorate will resist being fully duped by super-rich super PACs and vote for the man they already know.

But Obama is no champion empath either. Thanks perhaps to his peripatetic childhood and his absent father, Obama seems both hungry for crowd approval and limited in his ability to reach out to others. He’s a bright, lonely boy who needs a lot from us but can’t always return the favor, and he really only expresses public emotion when talking about Michelle, Malia, Sasha, or March Madness. The mythically cool and diffident figure whose blood supply goes mostly to his forebrain to oxygenate and nourish his IQ does make Romney, at moments, seem positively small-town, like a well-dressed Gomer Pyle on an especially great hair day. And Obama is also slightly better than Romney at dumbing himself down for humble occasions (he talks hoops more convincingly than Romney talks hunting and he bothers to drop his Gs when touring the heartland, a trick that is woefully willed-seeming and obvious although he appears to think he does it masterfully, the same way he thinks he does everything masterfully). But in the end he’s just brittle where Romney’s leaden, and twisty-quick where Romney’s straight and plodding. Neither man shares your burdens; they both have the springy, tensile, perfect postures of students who like to get their hands up fast, expect to be called on, always are, and never fail to offer the right answer, or at least a convincing rationale for how their wrong answer was properly arrived at given the flawed information they had to work with.

And there we have them, two men who don’t do the whole vicarious pain thing unless poor polling numbers force them to, who no one who’s genuinely hoping to relax would ever want to sit down and have a beer with (or a cream soda, in Romney’s case), and who, when they insist on wearing denim, always choose a shade that’s slightly too light and a cut that doesn’t flatter their unit but also makes you think about their unit, even though you really, really don’t want to do. One reason it’s hard to view them as individuals is that they don’t seem to view us as individuals. Their rhetoric, when talking about America, is lofty, impersonal, and panoramic, focused on the sum and not the parts.

We don’t want familiarity and empathy, after all, and, come to think of it, we seldom have. Did Teddy Roosevelt feel our pain? No, and he would have thrown up if he had. Did FDR? No, he was merely well informed about it by his patrician, yacht-owning advisers. Did Jack Kennedy? Hardly. Jack felt no pain, no pain of any kind—too doped up on speed and morphine. Did Nixon? No. He was mired in his own. Then why is it that, with no supporting evidence, we’re said by the folks on TV to want it terribly? My theory is that in the Oprah-haunted ’90s, when self-help had supplanted public-policy as the preferred path to widespread human betterment, the press needed an apolitical way to talk about politics. They made it about feelings. They made it about identifying, relating. They forgot about Harvard and Yale, the will-to-power, the ruthlessness that is ambition’s twin, and finally they forgot about us. They forgot that we want to salute, not share a hug, and that we don’t mind a little remoteness if its offset by wisdom, strength, and intellect. Americans are still puritans, down deep. We like to look, not touch. And we yearn, though it’s dorky to say, to look up.

_Walter Kirn is the author, most recently, of a memoir, "Lost in the Meritocracy." His 2001 novel "Up in the Air" is the basis for the film of the same name. His column appears every Friday. _

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