Character Revealed: Why Olaf Scholz Will Win

My respect for the man's public relations competence has been growing, combined with my sadness that Annalena Baerbock has so little chance that CNN doesn't bother mentioning her. Shame on CNN! She'd do something about climate change, but the unstated view here is, "Well, she has small children . . ." and then they shake their heads. Germans still employ an epithet for women who have children and careers: "Rabenmutter," the Duden 2020 dictionary will tell you, means "raven mother" denoting "a bad mother, who does not take sufficient care of her children, often because she is combining family with work. This derogatory term is used for a 'loveless, hard-hearted mother who neglects her children' or for an egoistic woman who refuses to have children due to economic or emotional circumstances." When a young German stockbroker told me nobody would vote for Baerbock because that's how people see her, I wondered how she saw herself--she with her several small children and her demanding job. What about New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, giving birth in office?

"Not in Germany," said the stockbroker.

That's where Olaf Scholz comes in. He's marketed himself perfectly as Angela Merkel's clone. It's just that he's male, but he's trying to make  that not count by having himself photographed doing Merkel's  trademark "triangle of power" hand gesture. His posters are all red-and-white-tried-and-true-been-here-since-the-Hanseatic-League-so-what-if they're-kind-of-like-CDU-colors. The message is what counts, and Scholz's messages have a brilliant simplicity:

(1) Kompetenz für Deutschland

(2) Kanzler für Deutschland

Competence defines chancellor--that's the message. You don't get one without the other. That logic appeals especially to a third of voters who are over sixty, and seem to think it's not quite right for a young woman to have such big ambitions, to say, "together we will change politics!" while she, they think, ought to spend more time with those babies because before you know it, they'll be grown. 

She's the real deal--she could walk in and Greta Thunberg the nation, but the folks my age won't give her a chance. Maybe she should have tried the hand gesture and the competence line. Instead, she said exactly what she thought. I like that. But  Oscar Wilde's observation about politics comes to mind: "a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician." The moral compass here turns to competence. You can innovate, experiment, even spontaneously speak, but you must first reveal your competence, which is both a character trait and a skill.