Authors: Hedrick Smith
Of course, the 1988 field includes experienced Washington politicians—Republicans George Bush, Robert Dole, and Jack Kemp, and Democrats Richard Gephardt, Albert Gore, and Paul Simon. More than the others, Dole and Gephardt have proven their skill at the inside power game, garnering votes and leading coalitions.
But if mastery of the art of government were of prime importance to voters, it is questionable that Howard Baker would have quit the competition to become White House chief of staff. Nor is it clear that experienced, popular, big-state governors such as Mario Cuomo of New York and James Thompson of Illinois would have hesitated to enter the race. Similarly, in the Washington power game, senators Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Sam Nunn of Georgia are known for intellectual leadership, legislative skill, and integrity. Both have tackled tough issues—taxes and financial policy in Bradley’s case, military and arms policy in Nunn’s case. They are influential with their political peers because they are knowledgeable, fair minded, and skilled at turning their ideas into policies and laws. But the political book on both Bradley and Nunn is that they lack the charisma for presidential-level video politics—a likely factor in keeping them out of the 1988 competition.
Image over Issues
Governmental competence has not scored high with the voters in the past three presidential elections. After Watergate, Washington experience and connections were a definite handicap, and that helped produce the victory of Jimmy Carter—as an outsider. Part of Ronald Reagan’s public relations genius has been somehow to distance himself from Washington, from the very government that he heads, and to treat the bureaucrats under his command as if he had no connection with them.
In the 1984 campaign, Peter Hart, pollster for Walter Mondale, warned Mondale not to expect much public credit for his three terms as a senator and four years as vice president. In July 1983, Hart had done a poll among prospective New Hampshire voters about the qualities they valued most in a president. The number one quality they
picked was: “A leader—can take charge and get results.” Number two was: “Compassionate—cares about people.” Number three was: “Has a plan for jobs and economic growth.” Way down on Hart’s list, tied for tenth (out of eighteen), was political competence: “Capable, knows the ins and outs of government.”
“What I said to Mondale is that experience is like a pair of twos in a game of poker,” Peter Hart told me. “It’s the lowest hand you can form. It’s the best there is until something better comes along, but it’s pretty easy for something better to come along.” Looking back over the past three presidential elections, Hart sized up the qualities that were valued most by voters. “In 1976, political virginity and purity counted much more than competence,” he said. “In 1980, it was toughness that counted—can-do, stand-up type of leadership. The 1984 election was defined by Reagan, so toughness still counted.”
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With the Iran-
contra
scandal, the Wall Street indictments for insider trading and the scandal over television preacher Jim Bakker’s adultery and lavish profits, the climate changed. Peter Hart and other pollsters found signs that voters were placing greater value on political leaders who play by the rules of the game and who showed integrity and a sense of community. Several presidential candidates stressed their competence and substantive knowledge. If those assets prove decisive in 1988, that could overturn the conventional wisdom of the past ten to fifteen years that image matters more than issues. As one of President Ford’s campaign strategists put it in an internal memo in June 1976: “The polls continue to show that issues are not a decisive campaign factor. The voters continue to react to personality traits and themes.”
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That echoed Richard Nixon’s view that he lost to Kennedy in 1960 because “I spent too much time … on substance and too little time on appearance: I paid too much attention to what I was going to say and too little to how I would look.”
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By 1968, as Joe McGinniss documented in
The Selling of the President 1968
, Nixon was paying more attention to his shave and his image.
In fact, concern with measuring and manipulating image has become such an obsession of campaign strategists that they have devised Buck Rogers gadgetry (borrowed from commercial advertising) to get instant feedback. For example, when seven Democratic contenders held a televised debate in Houston in July 1987, Democratic pollsters Harrison Hickman and Paul Maslin assembled eighty-five Iowa Democrats at the Holiday Inn in West Des Moines to record their instant reactions to the debaters. The Iowans were each given a cigarette-sized
gadget with a knob for dialing scores from one to seven. If they liked what was happening on the TV screen, the viewers dialed a seven; if their reaction was negative, they dialed a one. Their gadgets were wired to a nearby computer which compiled a running composite score. Actually, it computed more than an average; it showed whether some candidate was polarizing the audience, producing both sevens and ones, or just a lot of mushy, neutral fours. Media managers used that data to coach their candidates on how to remodel their images.
Dick Wirthlin, Reagan’s pollster, showed me how he has used a similar system, not only for Reagan’s campaign debates but for Reagan’s presidential addresses. Wirthlin was trying to find “power phrases” and hot moments that scored well with the audience—to be sure that Reagan repeated them in future speeches.
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Wirthlin and others chart audience reaction and then impose their graphs—like the sawtooth lines of stock-market averages—on videotapes of the candidates speaking. These reaction graphs suggest that people are often responding as much to the speaker’s facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language as to content. To people who complain this technique has overtones of Big Brother, Wirthlin and others answer that reaction graphs are useful tools generated by political competition. Insuring the right emotional impression of a candidate on television may be the heart of a winning strategy, but it hardly matches the far more complex task of coalition building in government.
Like Nixon recalling the 1960 campaign, Walter Mondale acknowledged that he had been hurt in the 1984 campaign by his stiff television image. “I think you know I’ve never really warmed up to television, and in fairness to television, it’s never really warmed up to me,” Mondale told reporters. Not that Mondale was proposing to do away with television. “Modern politics requires television,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s possible any more to run for president without the capacity to build confidence and communications every night.” But from years in government, Mondale, like Nixon, was worried about the implications of image campaigning: “The thing that scares me about that, the thing that has held me back, is that I think, more than we should, American politics is losing substance. It is losing debate on merit. It’s losing the depth that tough problems require to be discussed, and more and more it is that twenty-second snippet—you know, the angle, the shtick, whatever it is.”
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Presidential campaigns are superficial because the contenders want to reach so many people so quickly. Mass rhetoric is light on substance
and quick on slogans, because the public neither understands the intricacies of issues nor is willing to focus on much explanation. The frenetic pace of campaigning during the peak of the primary season makes thoughtful discussion of issues a rarity. Even with televised debates, the press often compounds these problems in the intense season of early primaries, by pouncing on the daily gaffes and stumbles of front-runners or lionizing some sudden challenger; by focusing on the narrative drama of who’s ahead, behind, limping or gaining in the horse race; by its fascination with the inside baseball of campaign tactics, rather than the issue or long-term record of candidates. Actually, the past records of Carter and Reagan were better indicators than most campaign rhetoric of what was to come in the White House. In Georgia, Carter had been a loner, an individualistic moralizer; and in California, there had been two Reagans: one, a dogmatic ideologue with charm, and the other, an occasionally pragmatic compromiser.
But television is so preoccupied with the immediate and the visual that it rarely takes much time with the past or with extended substantive interviews. And when the print press examines a politician’s performance, very few voters are interested in detail. The essence of the modern campaign is personality politics: the direct, gut impressions that viewers form from thirty-second daily blips on the screen. Advantage accrues to new-breed players at home with Boss Tube, preaching homilies and honing bumper-sticker themes to stick in voters’ memories. Advantage also accrues to the familiar and the comfortable, and to media manipulators expert at appealing to emotions rather than to reason and at crafting events to leave calculated impressions with viewers.
Obviously, Reagan’s 1984 campaign was a triumph of the modern political game—a textbook example of modern campaigning. It epitomized the disconnect between campaigning and governing; it was supremely successful despite its emptiness. Reagan was so smooth in selling his soothing reelection refrain (“It’s Morning Again in America”) that he lacked a clear policy mandate to use with Congress after the election. One reason Reagan had so much trouble gaining congressional support for his tax-reform bill in 1985–86 was that he had now risked putting this idea to the voters. His campaign was the quintessence of modern campaign choreography: upbeat music, feel-good rhetoric, symphonic patriotic backdrops, and occasional injections of powerful subliminal ads such as one showing a bear (obviously a Russian bear) stalking the woods in silent threat to America unless Reagan were returned to office. It was a campaign strong on symbolism and slick at
sliding off hard-policy choices. It produced a massive landslide but not a clear agenda or a coalition in Congress.
Certainly, there is nothing new in politicians shying away from clear programs and promises. Platitudes and happy hokum have long been the stuff of stump politicians. But the modern campaign, with its ever-present camera and the politician’s fear of video replay, has raised the politics of evasion to new heights. Campaigns that stress mood, imagery, symbolism, and personality deflect and drown out serious discourse. Their emptiness breeds voter cynicism and probably contributes to low voter turnout. But candidates find safety in vagueness.
By painful experience, many politicians have learned that candor is a liability, while evasion and hypocrisy pay off. Barry Goldwater got into hot water in 1968 by proposing to make Social Security voluntary, by advocating another invasion of Castro’s Cuba by Cuban exiles—this time with open American air support, and by suggesting that American field commanders in NATO be given discretionary authority to use tactical nuclear weapons. Four years later, George McGovern suffered self-inflicted wounds by advocating unconditional amnesty for draft violators; by proposing a welfare program of $1,000 grants for every American, which the rich would return in taxes; and by announcing he would cut the defense budget by $30 billion a year and save another $222 billion by closing tax loopholes. In 1984, Walter Mondale impaled himself by declaring before a nationwide television audience that beating the deficit would require raising taxes. “Let’s tell the truth,” he said. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”
Scores of Democratic congressmen (and many Republicans) agreed with Mondale, but they ran away from his tax position. He lost, and they won. It was but one of many, many incidents that caused Christopher Matthews, Speaker O’Neill’s spokesman, to note with a grin, “You never get in trouble in politics for lying. You only get in trouble for telling the truth”—or for speaking your mind.
Examples are legion of politicians who have lied, shaved the truth, or dodged honest answers and gone on to win office. As I reported, Reagan favored strategic defenses back in 1980, but his handlers considered it dynamite for him to touch the nuclear issue and he kept quiet. In 1976, Reagan had gotten in trouble for talking about making Social Security voluntary and urging transfer of $90 billion in federal programs to the states; but in the 1980 campaign, he kept mum on those items. In 1968, Richard Nixon dangled hints before voters that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War and resisted spelling it out, because it merely involved gradual withdrawal of American troops
and turning the fighting over to the Vietnamese. Lyndon Johnson totally misled the nation about his future course in Vietnam as he rolled up his 1964 landslide. Declared Johnson: “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing to protect themselves.” Of course, that is precisely what Johnson did.
Certainly, flip-flops and flimflam were practiced long before the advent of direct primaries and television. Franklin Roosevelt ran on a platform of cutting federal spending and did the opposite when he got into office. But the voters are more easily disarmed by candidates brought right into their living rooms by television. That causes what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” If a candidate can produce a warm gut feeling in viewers, they are more easily gulled by vague and misleading nostrums. That wins campaigns; it does not provide effective government.
The Tail Wags the Dog
Instead of the demands of governance setting the tests of the presidential campaign, high-tech campaign P.R. has invaded the White House. Our last two presidents have waged the permanent campaign, including public relations experts and pollsters high in their councils, while engaging in the public pretense that their policies were above mere politics. Small wonder. As Michael Malbin of American Enterprise Institute remarked, “What you do to get in office affects how you behave in office.”
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Presidential behavior is shaped by the process of selection.
We have experienced what political scientists call the “rise of the rhetorical presidency.”
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The original framers of the Constitution, one scholarly article pointed out, were suspicious of mass oratory, fearing that demagoguery would undermine rational, enlightened self-interest because politicians would be tempted to pander to the public mood. In the nineteenth century, public speechifying by presidents in office was rare. From Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, presidents did not even deliver their State of the Union addresses in person. For persuasion, they relied more on written argument or private discourse with congressional leaders. But with Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, the old pattern changed; Jack Kennedy established the televised presidency, which was succeeded by the public relations presidency. Listen to Richard Nixon, six years after leaving the White House: