At first the phrase was deployed only between quotation marks, as if it were a beaker of volatile brew that required tongs for safe handling.
The marks swiftly were shed, however, and now the term “charm offensive” — make that charm offensive — in reference to President Bush’s style apparently is regarded as self-explanatory. The phrase recently has been ferried to readers, minus the pincers of quotation marks, in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Brill’s Content, The New Republic and salon.com.
Just what, though, does it mean? Charm is an elusive and utterly subjective entity. We don’t like to think of it as being forced or contrived; its very essence is naturalness, ease, innate grace. The linking of “charm” and “offensive” is, in fact, oxymoronic. An offensive suggests a calculated campaign; charm is supposed to be effortless.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Dick Diver, the protagonist of “Tender Is the Night” (1933), hits this point nicely: “He had no idea that he was charming, that the affection he gave and inspired was anything unusual among healthy people.” If it’s strategic, it can’t be charm. Can it?
You may or may not find Bush charming. The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg argues that the new president can only be considered charming if charm now excludes intellectual curiosity and consists entirely of winks, smirks and the bestowal of nicknames. And you might also think that, after Bill Clinton, no president would want to be considered charming. It was the former president’s oft-remarked-upon charm, after all, that his detractors most hated, since it got him off the hook for his many indiscretions.
Charm may be as hard to depict as it is to embody. Fitzgerald often was exasperated by the challenge of making a character seem charming, short of having other characters say of her or him, “Wow, what a charmer!” which seems like cheating.
One of the best recent portraits of charm is the character of Terry (Mark Ruffalo) in “You Can Count on Me,” the superb new film written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan. Terry is a bona fide bum: scruffy, lazy, irresponsible. At the movie’s inception, you want to throttle him; he borrows money from his sister (Laura Linney) that you know he’ll never repay. Get lost, you want to say.
By the movie’s close, however, you’d be willing to cash in your 401k and hand it to Terry, no questions asked. He’s that charming. It isn’t a hearty, pushy charm, but a natural appeal that unwinds in a graceful scallop, like an ocean wave.
Having said all that, I must add that you might not find Terry the least bit charming. Charm is more than just a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of intense visceral response, like falling in love.
Is a charming character a matter of the person or the role, of the actor who plays the part or the writer who dreamed it up? If someone other than the incorrigibly charming George Clooney had played Doug Ross on all those “ER” seasons, would we have found the stubborn, mercurial, unreliable and promiscuous pediatrician quite so charming? I don’t think so. Clooney could play Mussolini and make him seem like a dreamboat.
Charm, then, is as ineffable and unfathomable in the arts as it is in politics: Why is one person considered charming by vast numbers of people while another, equally talented, is not? Why, pray tell, is Kevin Costner a star?
Charm is something with which one is endowed or not endowed. It can’t be borrowed or bought.
And it can’t be faked, which some people already know. At a fundraiser in the summer of 1999, Bush was asked what advice his wife, Laura, had given him. “She told me, `Don’t try to be charming. . . . Just be yourself.'” Was he listening?
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