The issue of temperament has played an outsized role in media coverage of this year’s presidential election. John McCain has been criticized as hot-headed, volatile, and rash. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has earned praise for never losing his temper, for staying above the fray, and for listening to all sides.

Obama himself suggested that his temperament is more suited to the presidency than McCain’s and wishes it to be one of the central issues of the campaign. In his acceptance speech in Denver last month, he said we should have “a debate about who has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next commander in chief.”

And, at the first presidential debate, it seemed he wanted to prove just that. He was cool, judicious, and fair-minded. He clearly wanted to appear more presidential than his opponent, and to let McCain come off as ornery or even irascible.

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Nonetheless, it was McCain’s temperament that showed to advantage. While Obama was parsing words and trying to appear presidential, what shone forth was McCain’s passionate love for his country, the soldiers in Iraq, and the veterans. In fact, you got the sense that while McCain suffers political questions, seeing into their true nature and meaning, Obama merely entertains them. After the debate, several commentators expressed puzzlement by the fact that, for a debate, Obama seemed to agree with McCain to a surprising degree.

Obama’s mistake is that he confuses being phlegmatic with being presidential. Hippocrates, the father of medical science, devised a system of grading personalities in the fifth-century B.C. that has never been more relevant. He described those with phlegmatic temperaments as harmonious, calm, easygoing, and diplomatic — precisely the traits that the current campaign coverage suggests we should want in any occupant of the Oval Office.

McCain, by contrast, is what Hippocrates would call choleric. Cholerics are passionate, decisive, opinionated, stubborn, and driven. To paraphrase one notable choleric, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (largely regarded as a great president), there is nothing cholerics love so much as a good fight. McCain’s temperament is, in part, what enabled him to survive imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Viet Cong.

Liberals will fret that the impulsive, passionate McCain has a temperament ill-suited for a president, yet it is those defining characteristics of the choleric — zeal, decisiveness, perseverance, a certainty of opinion on fundamental matters of right and wrong and on our core national values — that make McCain the better choice for the office. Not to lose one’s temper in the face of evil is actually dysfunctional and in certain cases downright dangerous. The real question is, then, not whether McCain has a temper (he most certainly does), but why Obama doesn’t and whether that matters.

Well, it does matter. The affable Obama is less-suited for the office because of his tendency to equanimity. The inclination to avoid confrontation and seek consensus, though admirable, are not the principal traits we should want in the person on whose desk the buck stops. The desire for everyone to get along too often leads to acquiescence and compromise, and a failure to do what is necessary in time of crisis (think of the indecisive Jimmy Carter and his mishandling of the Iran hostage crisis). That is not to say that dispassion and diplomacy have no place. They do, but you probably want them in a secretary of State, not the denizen of the Oval Office.

The real difference between McCain and Obama was captured in a small, but significant moment during the first debate, when Obama said that he “sits on the Veterans Affairs Committee.” McCain’s reply was heartfelt: “I know the veterans…And I love them. And I'll take care of them. And they know that I'll take care of them. And that's going to be my job. But, also, I have the ability, and the knowledge, and the background to make the right judgments, to keep this country safe and secure.”

George Will asked, “Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?” Perhaps not. But whose temperament, in truth, is more dismaying? One that is passionate, decisive, and uncompromising in the face of moral and political evil? Or one that is merely agreeable. To borrow Robert Frost’s line, I hold with those who favor fire.

 — Art and Laraine Bennett are the authors of the bestselling The Temperament God Gave You and The Temperament God Gave Your Spouse, which publishes today.