Other. Hitler, obviously.
His affairs were a part of it. Plus he was generally dishonest, self-centered, and petty.
I think that very, very few uber-powerful people are truly nice or really likeable, but he or she might seem nice when in the public spotlight. Politics is a dirty biz, nice people don’t last.
All to say: I’d support an unlikable candidate if my values aligned with her politics and she was well-educated, smart, and experienced.
What do you mean by “asshole”? They use harsh language or arbitrarily commit war crimes and genocide?
Wow, I’d say quite the opposite.
Back when the parties at least concurred on national goals, and overlapped somewhat in preferred means, it was more about team identity and sportsification (good word, btw). I could root for Team D, but know that the country would survive Team R in OK shape, just not quite as good.
Nowadays, the two parties fundamentally disagree on ends as well as means. It’s about real stuff; it couldn’t be any further from sportsification.
And team identity seems tied to that real stuff. People are on Team D because they want everyone to have jobs and get paid decently for them, to have good enough health care that doesn’t bankrupt them, don’t want people thrown back to their ‘native’ country that they haven’t seen since they were 5 years old, stuff like that. People are on Team R because…well, I’ll shut up because I can’t come up with a nice description because I don’t see one. But they want very different things than the people on Team D do, because they have very different beliefs about what is good.
Most of the sportsification I see isn’t from people, but from the mainstream media, which has so deeply bought into an ethic of evenhandedness in reporting on our political conflicts that they largely duck the consequences of what happens in the real world if Team D or Team R wins on a given issue, and gives you the day-to-day impression that it doesn’t affect people’s lives in a practical way any more than the outcome of Sunday’s football game will.