A recent meme, prompted by pieces in The Atlantic and the Washington Free Beacon, might shed some light on why the president’s recent “charm offensives”: Charm, properly understood, is dead. Today’s Americans do not have charm, nor can they understand it if they, on a rare occasion, encounter it.

Barack Obama may try to “charm” politicians and the public alike into supporting or accepting his agenda, but how successful can he be if he is not actually charming? And even if he did possess that elusive trait, how effective would his charm be if people are oblivious to it, or at least unmoved?

Earlier this month, The Atlantic’s Benjamin Schwarz asserted that most men — and I would add, most women — “hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can even identify it.” It is an “amoral virtue,” he says, a skillful, elegant art of manipulation that is recognizable in the stars of yesteryear (e.g., Cary Grant, James Garner), but is not present in 21st-century social interactions. Grant’s “exquisite balancing act,” according to Schwarz, has been deemed a useless talent because a “blunter,” to-the-point approach is generally more effective. Sonny Bunch, on his blog at the Free Beacon, took the argument a step further, writing that “societal forces have worked to actively punish charm.” Though he focused on gender relations, Bunch’s stance may apply more generally – after all, communication is so time-sensitive and politically correct that subtle, clever, ambiguous “small talk” is lost upon most people while frank, direct speech gets the message across. Charm is hard for the average Joe, and all the more so for the leader of the free world.

The president’s “charm offensives” aim to revive such small talk in order to persuade his opponents to agree to his policies, or some compromise. To encourage bipartisan cooperation earlier this spring, Obama hosted dinners that the White House for members of Congress, combining serious discussion with casual, off-the-record exchanges. He will soon embark on a tour of the country to personally convince the American people that the Affordable Care Act is a great idea and we should all buy into it, even as its implementation is currently flagging – at the end of the day, this effort also relies on his listeners’ experiencing firsthand the power of a “charming” personality.

There are plenty of significant problems with this strategy, but an obvious problem for the president’s ability to be “charming” lies in the distinction that Schwarz makes in his piece between the “self-aware” and the “self-absorbed.”

“Only the self-aware can have charm,” he writes, as “it’s bound up with a sensibility that at best approaches wisdom, or at least worldliness” and “can’t exist in the undeveloped personality.” Does President Obama display this acute responsiveness, this receptivity to the genuine character of the people he was elected to govern? Generally speaking, it wouldn’t seem that he does — and his policies even present similar problems. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation report found that four in ten Americans are unaware that the ACA is “still law and being implemented” this year and that 53 percent “approve of efforts by opponents to change or stop the law” (in part, perhaps, because they might like to keep their health coverage, a priority for which the president seems to have little regard). A self-aware person would recognize these profound obstacles and his own limited capacity to influence or change them. It is a shortcoming in American men, Schwarz wrote, that they are “often too self-absorbed or mono-focused, or – more commonly – guarded, distracted, and disengaged” to be charming. The current president could perhaps serve as the poster child for some of these traits, which leads one to surmise that a grand “charm offensive” just might fail.

While charm is “inherently manipulative,” Schwarz concluded, it is not “crudely utilitarian.” The president’s efforts – the dinners and this impending cross-country tour – are so obviously last-resort tactics that it’s hard for them to include the subtle nuances that were essential to charm. Whether the president’s efforts will work is debatable, but Obama’s “offensives” will certainly not be charming.