Gordon Brown is strug­gling in the present­a­tional department.

On 1 May, BBC 5 Live’s Nicky Camp­bell told him right out about “that lack of human con­nec­tion that you have.” (listen from 1:39) [Non-UK read­ers — ima­gine your polit­ical chief tak­ing this verbal slap­down?]

So how can Gor­don get that “human con­nec­tion”? Per­haps by tak­ing a leaf from the copy­book of another leader, new to the top job, facing some of the same per­cep­tual chal­lenges as Gor­don, and review­ing the effect­ive­ness of his own com­mu­nic­a­tions strategy.

The net res­ult of this oper­a­tion has been to cre­ate the impres­sion among aver­age voters … that we are an effi­cient, crafty, cold, machine…

[W]hat is needed is to get across those fun­da­mental decen­cies and vir­tues which the great major­ity of Amer­ic­ans like hard work, warmth, kind­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion for oth­ers, will­ing­ness to take the heat and not to pass the buck and, above all, a man who always does what he thinks is right, regard­less of the con­sequences (he would rather be a one-term Pres­id­ent doing what is right, rather than a two-term Pres­id­ent doing what is wrong), and just plain guts and courage.

In almost two years, none of this has got­ten across…

This is the primary fail­ure of the pub­lic rela­tions side of my first two years, and the irony of it is, of course, that we have gained the liab­il­ity of being known as a “PR-obsessed Admin­is­tra­tion” and have been less suc­cess­ful in PR than in any other area of undertaking.

I would like for you to dis­cuss this … I have mixed feel­ings about whether X should be there and even pos­sibly Rums­feld, although I would lean against Rums­feld since he is such a prac­tical, no-nonsense type… [pdf]

The Pres­id­ent had already benefited from present­a­tional advice from Fox News boss Roger Ailes:

I think he should wear make-up or at least beardstick…A double layer of beard­stick should be applied to the area above the upper lip. He is espe­cially dark there.

So who was it? Well, Don­ald Rums­feld was around the White House for a quite a while before he signed on under Bush 43.

And Gor­don Brown? He looks noth­ing like Richard Nixon — at least not after a bit of beardstick.