Political Enneagram

Talk show hosts are "personalities" in a professional recognizable way. So here are some Enneagram styles you can study. The Keith Olbermann/Rachel Madow MSNBC combination is interesting from an Enneagram perspective. They share roughly the same values, but Keith is a One. Only a One would have as part of his program "Worst Persons in the World." Ones sort for what is wrong and Keith does so with hot vengeance. You can feel his moral outrage in his clipped speech, the anger in his voice and his penetrating look that convicts as much as convinces.

On the Enneagram diagram, Ones and Sevens are each other's shadow. This means that each celebrates those traits that the other tries to suppress. So when Rachel, a clear Seven, comes on, the mood is lighter and she applies the needle where Keith preferred the hatchet. She will smile brightly while skewering and the accusation is not so much that her opponents are evil is that they are funny in their ignorance and posturing.

On the other side of the TV set are Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly. Both of them are heavier than Keith or Rachel. They are both Eights, furious that their way does not prevail. The level of anger is more pronounced, in Rush it comes out both in volume and in caricature, in O'Reilly it is more like existential outrage: the world should not be the way it is. Why doesn't it listen to me?

Enneagram styles do not gravitate to Left or Right. Obama, Hilary Clinton and McCain were all Ones with widely differing views. I can see no correlation between position and personality.