t's emotional involvement in an issue are powerful influences on how he defines the issue itself, how much attention he pays to it, which facts and persons he sees as relevant to its resolution, and, finally, what principles and purposes he associates with the issue.
Barber's thesis is that character is formed in childhood, world view in adolescence, and style in early adulthood, and he therefore would turn to an analysis of the candidate in each of these periods as a way of determining these elements. He never succeeds in actually providing the method for accomplishing this task with an unknown candidate, using instead a hindsight method for examining Presidents who have already been in office and who have demonstrated their character. Barber can then look back on their life and point out where certain traits may have developed. Such an exercise is interesting and may indicate both the importance of certain character traits and how they might have been formed for a particular individual, but it does not serve to create a predictive tool that can be applied easily to any situation in the future.
Barber delineates four types of presidential character he sees as being exemplified in those who have been in the office since Theodore Roosevelt (a time-line selected apparently from the view that the Presidents of this century have more in common with each other than they do with earlier Presidents). The types are described as baselines, or guides for de
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