CANADIANS ARE STRONG BELIEVERS IN DEMOCRACY. IN KEEPING with the lengthy constitutional heritage that we inherited from the British, we are committed to the principles of individual rights, the rule of law, respect for minorities, and representative government by a Parliament elected through universal adult suffrage. We even spend a great deal of time, effort, and money promoting democracy abroad, and over the past few years Canada stood fast and strong in support of the popular revolutions that developed in Eastern Europe, especially the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where Canadians played a key role as independent observers.
Yes, Canadians are deeply committed to democracy — as long as it is being practiced someplace else. Here at home, we have developed such a firm contempt for the democratic process that in our national elections, virtually every issue of substance, from our role in the war in Afghanistan to the perennial question of Quebec’s place in the federation, is overshadowed by the media’s interest in people who have little interest in the election and who show no inclination to vote. Instead of being treated as the bad citizens they are, these “alienated voters” are routinely heralded as canaries in the coal mine, principled abstainers from a sham democracy.
This is not just a Canadian problem. With a very few exceptions, voter turnout is in steady decline in all Western democracies. The phenomenon is commonly referred to as “voter apathy,” although it seems to be rooted in a much more active dislike of politicians and the political system. In all the stories you see about people who do not vote, it is rare to see anyone admit to being simply uninterested in politics. Virtually every person profiled has something to say about the issues, the parties, the leaders, and the system. It is just that none of it is positive.
The complaints are built around a common theme, which is that the democratic system provides only the illusion of choice. “There is no real difference between the political parties” is one typical complaint; another is that “none of the parties speaks to me or reaches out to me or represents my views.” A variation is that politicians are liars and phonies who are not open to new ideas, never do what they say they will do, which is itself read as a natural consequence of the fact that politics is shallow and image obsessed, driven by spin doctors and pollsters who see their craft as just another branch of marketing.
Consider the case of former, and now disgraced, U.S. senator John Edwards. In the spring of 2007, when Edwards was running for the Democratic Party nomination for president, he was obliged to return $800 to his campaign to cover the cost of two haircuts from a Beverly Hills stylist. For most people, the revelation that they routinely spend $400 on a haircut would be a bit embarrassing, except that Edwards is notorious for being inordinately proud of his hair. So much so that when he ran for vice-president in 2004 as Al Gore’s running mate, Republicans took to calling him “the Breck girl” (after the famous ad campaign from the 1970s for Breck shampoo that featured models with luxuriantly feathered hair).
Canadians like to think that they hold the moral high ground over their American cousins, in politics as in so many other aspects of life. But even though we had a good laugh at Edwards for epitomizing the image-obsessed shallowness of American political culture, around the same time that Edwards was taking heat, the Canadian press was starting to ask questions about Michelle Muntean, an image consultant and psychic who served as a fulltime personal stylist for Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister. The discovery that he had an image consultant only confirmed what critics had been saying about Harper since he took power in 2006, namely, that he was enamored with the United States and its republican institutions, especially the pomp and deference accorded the presidency.
This sort of stuff also tends to confirm what just about everyone believes about politics these days: our leaders are little more than talking heads, blow-dried actors whose performances are stage-managed by a phalanx of speechwriters, spin doctors, marketing gurus, pollsters, and image consultants. While these people may have once been content to stay behind the scenes, strategists and consultants are now household names. For example, everyone knows that Karl Rove is the evil genius responsible for George W. Bush’s two victories, while the political consultant James Carville is a public figure who has written a stack of books about how he and his team engineered Bill Clinton’s back-to-back presidencies.
The stories of image-obsessed pols pile up. Al Gore notoriously asked Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, to give him style advice during his 2004 campaign (she suggested he wear earth tones), and Bill Clinton kept Air Force One sitting on the runway at LAX while he got a $200 trim from Christophe, a Belgian hair-dresser-to-the-stars, but it is important to keep in mind that none of this is all that new. When Joe McGinniss published The Selling of the President in 1968, Americans were shocked by the stories of how Richard Nixon’s campaign was stage-managed by Roger Ailes, the young TV producer who would go on to found the Fox News Channel. Forty-seven years later, a Harvard business professor suggested that when the book about the Obama campaign is written, it should be entitled The Marketing of the President — as if this was a novel observation. Even lamenting image politics is an old story. When Joe McGinniss wrote, “The qualities which now commonly make a man or woman into a ‘nationally advertised’ brand are in fact a category of human emptiness,” he was quoting from The Image, a best-selling indictment of mass culture written in 1961 by Daniel Boorstin.
In all likelihood, politicians have probably always been concerned about how they appear in public, and the public has probably always mocked them for it. But even though Caesar likely got grief for fussing over his toga whenever he got up to speak, when it comes to explaining why politics has turned into just another consumer good, there is no question that shifts in mass communications have had a substantial effect. Radio was revolutionary in its way, but when it comes to changing the way politics itself is practiced, nothing compares to television. As Time magazine columnist Joe Klein puts it, television “set off a chain reaction that transformed the very nature of politics.”
Television altered politics in a number of ways. First, and most obviously, it made the politician’s appearance, his or her image, and ability to perform in front of the camera their most important quality. It is frequently suggested that the wheelchair-using Franklin Roosevelt would not have the slightest hope of being elected president today, but it is probably more accurate to say that he would never have been elected governor of New York, let alone president, if television had existed in the 1930s. It is part of our culture’s received wisdom that it was television that destroyed Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy in 1960, beginning the night a sick and pasty Nixon sweated his way through their first televised debate, his five o’clock shadow pushing through his makeup. It is widely believed that radio listeners thought Nixon won the debate while television viewers gave it to Kennedy, though that remains a matter of some dispute. What is true is that after that debate Kennedy crept into the lead for the first time, and when he won the election, it was interpreted as a victory of youth, charisma, and idealism — the quintessential virtues of the television age. As Rick Perlstein puts it in Nixonland: “At the ballot box it was almost a tie. On television, in retrospect, it looked as if John F. Kennedy had won in a landslide.”
The second thing television brought to politics was money. Lots of it. Before TV, politicians met with their constituents either at town hall meetings or rallies, or indirectly to the masses via the disembodied media of radio or print journalism. Television combined the mass audiences of print and radio with the intimacy of the small group, giving politicians the ability to communicate directly with millions of voters at the same time. But television advertising is extraordinarily expensive, which makes the ability to charm millions of dollars out of the pockets of your supporters yet another vital political asset. In turn, the smell of big money draws the attention of all sorts of political parasites who thrive in the new media ecosystem.
Finally, television affects the way politicians and their spin-doctor courtiers engage one another. As anyone who has ever participated in a televised debate or panel discussion quickly discovers, the medium is an intellectual Flatland, a dominion that abhors nuance, depth, or even the drawing of distinctions. What television thrives on is conflict, and it is important to understand that when political programs invite a liberal and a conservative to debate the issues of the day, the producers have no desire or expectation that there will be any agreement or even concessions by either side. The conflict is the message, and while there may be a winner (in the sense that someone might succeed in scoring some prep-school debating team shots), “winning” has nothing to do with being right. The media’s pundit class feeds this gladiatorial conception of political debates by treating them as a boxing match, with the postdebate analysis invariably focused on who scored what points, and whether any of the candidates was able to strike the mythical “knockout blow.”
The high stakes make debaters increasingly risk averse, and when the presidency or premiership is on the line, the goal is not to win but simply to survive without making any serious blunders. No one wants to be the next Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s vice-president, who is remembered for two things: spelling potato with an e and comparing himself to John F. Kennedy during his televised debate with Lloyd Bentsen during the 1988 campaign. Bentsen smiled slightly as he gave Quayle the shiv: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” It is no wonder then that politics in the age of television consists almost entirely of heavily scripted events that offer little more than prepared statements, canned responses, and memorized talking points. That is why the televised debates between leaders or leadership candidates are so stultifying they make you want to drive nails into your skull.
If anything, the problem is getting worse. Over the past few decades, broadcast network television has been supplemented by the accretion of new media outlets, technologies, and marketing techniques. Cable television brought us the twenty-four-hour news cycle, while new information technology and databases gave us push-polling, market segmentation, and overnight tracking. Now we are seeing the fundamental transformation of journalism itself, thanks to the Internet. The blogosphere turns anyone into an insta-pundit, and a cell phone with a camera makes you into an on-the-spot reporter. With faster computers and cheap editing software, a laptop computer is now a film studio, and with a free YouTube account anyone can quickly disseminate their own attack ads. With the possible exception of the biggest celebrities, politicians spend more time than anyone else in front of a camera, to the point where politics appears thoroughly embedded in what French social critic Guy Debord called “The Society of the Spectacle.”
Building on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Debord argued that the trajectory of modern society is characterized by a shift from an authentic and active lived reality to an alienated existence that is mediated by images, representations, and passive consumption. The point is not that the consumption of images becomes an increasingly important part of life, but that life itself comes to be lived through representations. As Debord puts it, “The Spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
When you put these three changes together — the focus on image, the role of money and techniques of mass marketing, and the rise of the permanent 24–7 media cycle — it is obvious that critics such as Joe Klein are right: television and its successor media helped transform the nature of politics. Furthermore, there is no question that many people in both North America and Europe find themselves completely turned off by a democratic process that is permanently mired in bullshit (in the strict Frankfurtian sense of the word). What we are looking for, but not getting, from traditional politics is authenticity — a connection to a politician that isn’t mediated, marketed, and shaped by how the message will play in the overnight tracking polls.
But there is a problem here, which is that it is the desire for authenticity that leads to a politics that is scripted and sculpted in the first place. We say we want to see the real person behind the mask, but remember the revulsion directed toward Nixon for being all sweaty on television. We say we want spontaneity and real emotion, but think back to the mocking reaction to Hillary Clinton crying on the campaign trail, or the tearful, rambling speech given by North Carolina governor Mark Sanford after he returned from a weeklong tryst in Argentina with his lover. Finally, we say we want to be able to choose from parties and policies that accord with our beliefs and values, but when we are offered a consumer-friendly menu of political “brands,” we rebel against the phoniness of it all. In short, the desire for authenticity is the cause of virtually all the major problems with our politics today.
When Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness to describe American political discourse, he defined it as: “What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true. It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.”
Colbert is bang on. What matters is not the facts, not the truth of the matter, but an emphasis on emotional truth and personal perception. But this is just another way of describing authenticity. The story of how Americans demanded authenticity in their politics and — to their great chagrin — got exactly what they asked for, begins with something called Turnip Day.
Harry Truman had been running a caretaker presidency since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, and nobody expected much from him in 1948. The Democratic Party was divided into three factions, and the Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey, was widely expected to win the upcoming election. But at the Democratic convention confirming his nomination, Truman gave a remarkable speech. Coming on stage after midnight, he spoke plainly, simply, and without notes. He told the audience that he fully expected to win the election, and he challenged the “do-nothing Congress” to get to work.
On the 26th of July, which out in Missouri we call Turnip Day, I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis — which they say they are for in their platform … I shall ask them to act upon … aid to education, which they say they are for … civil rights legislation, which they say they are for …
Joe Klein calls this Truman’s “Turnip Day” moment, and he loves it. Klein sees Truman’s speech as a dose of pure authenticity, in both style and content. It was not a prepared address. No speech-writer had gone over the words and carefully excised anything controversial. It was off-the-cuff, earthy, and courageous, especially when it came to Truman’s declaration of support for civil rights legislation. “In the process,” writes Klein, “Truman was able to remind voters who he was — an average guy, a man of the soil, who was plainspoken often to a fault.”
Klein wishes that our politicians allowed themselves more Turnip Day moments. He thinks our politics could do with more spontaneity, courage, and authenticity. Instead of talking haircuts, he wants leaders who are comfortable in their skin, who aren’t afraid of going off-message or making a mistake, and who are willing to tell the style consultants to take a hike. In the concluding pages of his Politics Lost, Klein puts out the call for a leader who can tell a joke, cry, get angry, even indulge in the odd vice or guilty pleasure, within reason. Politicians, he says, need to “figure out new ways to engage and inspire us … or maybe just some simple old ways, like saying what they think as plainly as possible.”
This is an extremely widespread sentiment. As New York Times columnist David Brooks likes to tell readers, ever since the Reagan revolution of 1980, Americans have always voted for the presidential candidate who does the best impression of a fraternity brother, and if you go down the list of pairings over the past eight presidential elections, you have to concede that he’s on to something. Reagan and Bush the First over Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis; Clinton over Bush and Dole; and then Bush the Second over Gore and Kerry. In every case, the American people opted not for the candidate who offered the best policies, who had the most experience, or who had assembled the most competent team around them. No, they chose as their leader the man they most wanted to have a beer with.
By the time the 2008 presidential election rolled around, the “authenticity” meme had completely taken hold. As a result, competent candidates such as Mitt Romney (who had plenty of executive and private sector experience) and Hillary Clinton (who had spent the last eight years becoming an expert on a number of key files) got steamrolled, as both parties had decided that the only chance they had of winning was to find a candidate who did not suffer from a perception that they were too slick, too phony, too prepared, too stiff, or simply too private. From both Republicans and Democrats the ensuing campaign was an absolute buffet of authenticity, where each candidate offered something a little different in the way of originality, courage, spontaneity, or straight shooting.
On the Republican side there was John McCain, who had a longstanding reputation as one of America’s most “authentic” politicians — as mentioned earlier, his campaign bus was called the Straight Talk Express. Authenticity-wise, McCain’s counterpart on the Democratic Party ticket was vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden. As the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden had become one of the most influential voices in Congress, but his Chiclet teeth and hairplugs gave him a thoroughly prepackaged sheen. Yet given his tendency to speak first and think later, Biden had also earned himself a reputation as a loquacious and somewhat gaffe-prone campaigner.
It was with the selection of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president and John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate that things really got interesting. Palin was the moose-hunting maverick governor of Alaska who came down to the lower forty-eight to defend the working-class authenticity of rural and heartland America against the elitism and pretension of the urban elites. Meanwhile, Barack Obama managed to win his party’s nomination, and then the presidency itself, despite being a one-term senator with virtually no executive experience. He staked his candidacy on his promise to bridge two of the great divides in American life: the racial divide between blacks and whites, and the social and cultural divide between red states and blue states. Obama’s postracial and postpartisan authenticity would take America beyond both the cynical triangulation of the Clinton era and the hardnosed pandering to the party’s “base” that characterized the strategy that Karl Rove used to engineer George W. Bush’s two victories. Yet as the campaign wore on, Obama found his credibility on both counts called into question.
Few presidential candidates were greeted with as much hope and controversy as Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois. On paper, Obama was dream candidate for the Democratic Party. The son of a black father and white mother, Obama was born in Hawaii and educated at Columbia and Harvard. He taught constitutional law for a decade at the University of Chicago before being elected to the Senate in 2004. As many observers put it, Obama is the Tiger Woods of U.S. politics — accomplished, charismatic, and racially mixed. Only one question nagged at his candidacy: is Barack Obama “authentically black”?
The problem had something to do with his mixed-race heritage. Across the political and racial spectrum, Americans cleave to the “one-drop” rule, which holds that a black person is any person with any known African black ancestry. While the rule was used by white racists in the early twentieth century as a way of introducing legislation to prevent miscegenation (and keep the white blood line “pure”), it was later turned on its head by black activists who used the one-drop rule to enlarge the size of the black community in order to enhance its political power and cultural influence. In contrast with people in Latin American countries, where skin color is the subject of a highly politicized color chart (dark = low status, light = high status), African Americans are comparatively easygoing about shades of black. The light-skinned Vanessa Williams is considered no less a member of the black community than, say, the much darker-skinned Wesley Snipes.
No, the problem for Barack Obama is not how much blackness is in his blood, but where that blood is from. It is impossible to separate the American discourse on race from the question of slavery, and almost all of the slaves brought to the United States by white slavers were taken from the curve of West Africa that stretches from Senegal, down through Liberia, as far south as Angola. For many black Americans, especially the older generation that came of age during the flood tide of the civil rights movement, in order to be an authentic African American you have to be descended from those West African slaves. But Obama’s father was born in Kenya, which is on the east coast. As civil rights activist and Pentecostal minister Al Sharpton put it, “Just because you’re our color doesn’t make you our kind.”
Once again, it took a fake news program to expose the rank absurdity of this position. Debra Dickerson, columnist and author of The End of Blackness, appeared on the satirical Colbert Report to assert that Obama is not black because “in the American political context, ‘black’ means the descendant of West African slaves brought here to labor in the United States.” But Colbert, making a point that mainstream journalists were almost uniformly too afraid to make, wondered why Obama didn’t simply run as a white man? Or if he was not an authentic American black man, couldn’t he run as “nouveau black”? Dickerson found this latter suggestion congenial, noting that as a genuine African American, Obama was a sort of “adopted brother.” Colbert went on to tie Dickerson in knots, finally rendering her speechless with the suggestion that perhaps the way for Obama to get some authentic-black cred was for him to spend a year or so as Jesse Jackson’s slave.
Things didn’t get any easier for Obama after he won the election. Shortly before Christmas 2008, Chip Saltsman made a dumb decision. The former campaign manager for Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was angling for a job as Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman, and by way of sucking up to members of the committee he sent them all a CD of songs that included a song parody called “Barack the Magic Negro.” Sung in the cadences of Al Sharpton to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and popularized by Rush Limbaugh, the reworked lyrics suggested that Obama’s popularity stemmed from the fact that he assuages white guilt by making whites feel noble about voting for such a safe and nonthreatening black candidate.
The ensuing uproar effectively torpedoed Saltsman’s hopes of winning the chairmanship. In fact, the RNC was so desperate to ease public fears that the party had been taken over by a bunch of closet Klansmen that they gave the job to Michael Steele, a man with a reputation for being both authentically black and a bit of a loose cannon. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Steele told The Washington Times that the Republicans needed a “hip-hop” make-over in order to go after younger voters. “We need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets,” he said. “We want to convey that the modern-day GOP [‘Grand Old Party’] looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”
Even if you haven’t heard the term magic negro, you know what it refers to. It is one of the most manufactured and stereotyped roles in film and fiction, that of the wise, sometimes old, occasionally blind, black person who — despite being in a nominally subservient role — uses his special insight or power to save or redeem the white man. Uncle Remus is the classic example, but think also of the role played by Will Smith in the film The Legend of Bagger Vance, the Mekhi Phifer role as Eminem’s sidekick in 8 Mile, or the John Coffey character played by Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile. The Matrix has two magic negroes, Morpheus and the Oracle. Virtually every character played by Morgan Freeman over the past twenty years is a magic negro; he regularly spends his time either saving white women from serial killers (Kiss the Girls) or literally redeeming soulless white men (Bruce Almighty). In fact, once you understand the role, you start to see magic negroes everywhere (every cop show ever made has a magic negro police sergeant) along with close relatives the magic Mexican, the magic Chinaman, and the magic mentally or physically disabled person.
But as offensive as it may seem, Chip Saltsman, Rush Limbaugh, and other white Republicans were not the first ones to accuse Obama of being a magic negro. In fact, when he appeared more or less out of nowhere to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, it was the black establishment in America that first accused him of playing off white guilt and acting like the savior of humankind. Indeed, as things evolved for Obama, questions about his racial background took a back seat to deeper worries about his political views, to the point where he was dogged throughout his campaign by two difficult and fundamentally opposing charges. For many blacks, he was simply not black enough, hence the magic negro charge.
As if infighting within the black community weren’t enough to deal with, Obama also had to deal with suspicion from within his own party that he wasn’t sufficiently committed to the more ideological aspects of the Democratic platform. Despite the fact that Republicans tried to paint Obama as the senator with the most liberal voting record in the house, suspicion remained right up to the end that he was far more sympathetic to Republican positions than he was letting on. This was a predictable consequence of his second claim to the authenticity crown — the idea that his promise was not just postracial, but postpartisan as well.
One day during the 2008 election, I arrived at work to find someone had placed a John McCain “Call to Action” figure on my desk. They are still widely available online for only US$13.95, but if you prefer the Sarah Palin model, it is a bit pricier, at $27.95. As for Barack Obama, he has become one of the great Warholian figures of our age, his image emblazoned on everything from T-shirts and baseball caps to a delightfully short dress by designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, which was exhibited on the runway during Paris Fashion Week. There is also Obama sushi, Obama snow sculpture, Obama sneakers, and a colossal amount of Obama-themed art portraying him as everyone from Jesus to Superman — most of it lovingly catalogued on www.obamaartreport.com.
In Canada (where there was a federal election running parallel to the one in the United States), our prime minister took to wearing a blue sweater vest in the hope that it would change his image from aloof, laser-eyed alien to folksy family man, while the left-wing New Democratic Party, led by a bald, mustachioed man named Jack Layton, fought back against Layton’s “Taliban Jack” reputation (he advocated negotiating with the Taliban) by trying to rebrand its position “The New Strong.” The fact is, whatever your partisan leanings, there is a brand for you. Politics seems more and more a branch of marketing, with parties and leaders packaged and sold using the same techniques used to sell energy drinks, NBA players, and everything in between.
A lot of people find this highly objectionable. At best, the consequence of turning politics into a consumer good is the Big-Macification of civil discourse, where politicians are forced to pander to the lowest common denominator of the electorate. At worst, it supposedly turns the electorate into “Manchurian voters,” where the manipulation and propaganda that goes on in political advertising basically tricks or bamboozles people into voting for a sunny image that masks a sinister agenda.
This view of party politics as a distasteful introduction of the techniques of consumer marketing into our democracy is what formed the basis of Obama’s postpartisan appeal. It also happens to be completely misguided. The fact is, the selling of politics does not undermine democracy, it enhances it, and the branding of political parties and leaders is not a tool for manipulating voters, but a mechanism for enabling democratic participation.
Consider how brands work. The central question that every consumer faces is, “How do I know I’m not getting ripped off?” How do you know that this bag of flour isn’t adulterated or that these new shoes won’t fall apart the minute you get home? Unless you’ve managed to follow the entire production process from start to finish, you don’t. You trust the flour isn’t full of sawdust because Robin Hood says so. You have faith the sneakers will withstand a running season or two because Nike has put its swoosh on them. Brands are one of the earliest and most effective forms of consumer protection, where trust in the brand (and the company behind it) substitutes for first-hand knowledge or expertise.
Political brands work the same way. In an election, the question every voter needs an answer to is, “How do I know what I’m buying into with my vote? How do I know I’m not getting snookered?” This is where political brands, better known as parties, come in. The role of the party is more or less to take the dense convolutions of modern governance and reduce them to a relatively simple brand proposition. Are you generally in favor of a strong central government that will build national social programs? Then vote Democrat (or, in Canada, Liberal). Would you prefer a more decentralized federation and limited state interference in your life and in the economy? Then the Republicans or Conservatives are the party for you.
The paradox of all branding is that the more complicated things get, the simpler the messaging has to be, which is why politics has become so intensely focused on the party leader’s character and image. It’s pretty remarkable that in an election in which American voters were being asked to decide who would control a budget of somewhere north of $3 trillion, they were essentially offered a choice between two brands: Barack Obama’s “Change” and John McCain’s “Honor.” But what is more surprising still is how well the system actually works. Most people don’t have the time or, frankly, the ability to properly digest budgets, policy documents, or drafts of new bills, and the distillation of the stupendous complexities of the modern state to a handful of simple but distinct brands is not just useful, but necessary. As in the consumer economy so in modern politics — both would grind to a halt without brands as a lubricant.
What of the worry that politics ends up being marketed like Big Macs, pitched to the lowest common denominator? The proper reply is to this is, So what? People always put the emphasis in that phrase on the word lowest, when it should be placed on the word common. The government wields a monopoly over the use of violence, among other things, and any party that wants to claim the right to use violence had darn well better make sure it has the lowest common denominator onside or it is in big trouble. To adapt a line from the genius of twentieth-century advertising, David Ogilvy: the lowest common denominator is not a fool, she is your neighbor. In a democracy, every politician is in the business of selling electoral Big Macs, and anyone who thinks that’s not his job is either a born loser or a tyrant manqué.
We need to give voters a little more credit. People are no more bamboozled by a John McCain action figure into voting for John McCain than they are tricked into buying a PC because Jerry Seinfeld is in the ad. That just isn’t the way branding or human behavior works. Indeed, whether it’s Nike’s swoosh, or the ubiquitous Hope poster of Obama designed by Shep Fairey, or Stephen Harper’s blue sweater vest, no one ever admits to being a dupe of the marketing. The worry is always that other people — in particular, the people who support the other side — are being manipulated. And so throughout the Bush years, the left in America complained about the way Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were sowing fear and panic over terrorism and keeping the religious right all a-boil over fears about abortion and Mexican immigrants. Once Obama became president and the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, the right immediately started complaining that the electorate had been duped by his pretty speechifying and his wispy promises about Hope and Change.
This is a slippery slope, and it is dangerous for anyone, no matter what their partisan allegiances, to have so much contempt for voters. Democracy is based on the premise that reasonable people can disagree over issues of fundamental importance, from abortion and gay rights to the proper balance between freedom and security. When the mere fact that someone supports the other side becomes evidence that they have been brainwashed, then the truth is you no longer believe in democracy.
During the 2008 campaign, there was at least one person in America who wasn’t buying into Obama’s postpartisan authenticity shtick, and that was Sarah Palin. When she arrived on the scene at the end of August, she promptly reminded everyone that it was possible to be both partisan and authentic. The core of Palin’s appeal was a fairly straightforward defense of small-town America and its small-town values of “honesty, sincerity, and dignity,” as against the (presumably) dishonest, insincere, and undignified city-dwellers. As she put it in her galvanizing address at the Republican Party convention in early September 2008, small-town people are “the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars.”
There was nothing really new in this — the populist defense of the working classes as being more authentic than the effete snobs and fakers who live in places like San Francisco, New York, and Washington is as old as the hills that it romanticizes, and it forms the basis of the appeal of singers such as Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. The nadir of this brand of blue-collar romanticism was the embarrassment that was Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, a former plumbing-contractor turned conservative-pundit better known as Joe the Plumber. Wurzelbacher came to fame during the 2008 election when he confronted Obama about his business tax policy. While he refused to publicly endorse either McCain or Obama, Wurzelbacher repeatedly referred to Obama’s plans as “socialism,” and he questioned Obama’s loyalty to both America and Israel. After the election, he made an ill-advised trip to Israel as a war correspondent, and then quickly faded from public view. What was interesting about Palin’s authenticity gambit is the way she used her candidacy to launch America right back into the running battle over religion, social values, and patriotism that has convulsed the nation’s politics for the past forty years.
Palin chose to fight this fresh skirmish in the culture wars on some rather odd terrain, with the lines of opposition forming not along traditional issues such as abortion or gay marriage, but, most curiously, over who has the better hobbies. To put it bluntly: Sarah Palin must be the first candidate for vice-president to have staked her claim to the office largely on the fact that in her spare time she enjoys shooting and dismembering large, defenseless mammals. She only alluded to the hobby in her convention speech, but before John McCain’s own address the next day they played a video biography, obviously put together in great haste, that was designed to introduce this complete unknown from Alaska to the party faithful. What was the thrust of the message? As the cheesy, movie-trailer voice-over intoned at the beginning of the tape: “Mother … Moose hunter … Maverick.”
All politics is to some extent personal, but Palin seemed determined to outdo both Obama and McCain in making an argument out of her lifestyle. In her speech, she talked about herself a lot, lobbed some insults at city folks, and then talked about her entire family a lot more. She’s a hockey mom and her husband works in the oil fields and fishes and races snowmobiles on his days off. Son Track was off killing Iraqis, while daughter Bristol, only sixteen, had gone and done her best Jamie Lynn Spears impression and got pregnant.
When she finally got around to talking about her Democratic opponent, Barack Obama must have felt a bit like a moose caught in her gunsights. With calm precision, she took aim at his reputation as a “community organizer,” at his “high-flown speech-making,” even at the faux-Greek columns that flanked his own acceptance speech.
What Palin did was something the media (and most Republicans, for that matter) had not had the temerity to do, and that is refuse to give Obama the deference owed to his status as the first black candidate for president. Instead of respecting his background, she made fun of it, treating him as just another too-thin, Ivy-League-educated, wine-sipping member of the liberal elite. Perhaps more than anyone else, she accepted his “postracial” branding, treating the fact that he happens to be (half) black as irrelevant. In choosing to pick on Obama’s lifestyle, Palin struck closer to the new realities of the supposed culture war than even she seemed to realize.
In his 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas, critic Thomas Frank complained that for decades Republicans have been effectively conning the party’s base. They get the supporters all heated up over things like gay marriage and abortion during campaigns, but once in power they quietly put those issues on the back burner, turning their attention to issues that matter to their fiscal conservative backers: cutting taxes, freeing trade, and eviscerating the welfare state. Through this massive electoral bait-and-switch, Frank argues, good-hearted authentic folk from the heartland are bamboozled into voting against their economic self-interest. Always willing to trade economic hope for religious comfort, they serve as cannon fodder in a culture war the Republican elites have no intention of trying to win.
Frank’s argument is actually just a variation on Obama’s own ill-advised remark about “bitterness” causing people to cling to guns and religion. Obama and Frank think the sorts of people who like to thump Bibles and shoot moose and ride snowmobiles also tend to be economically disadvantaged: that is, they assume that people with working-class values must also have working-class incomes, and that the culture war is actually a disguised class war between well-off social liberals and not-so-well-off social conservatives.
This is an assumption that Palin herself was happy to play off in her attacks on Obama. But if it was true, once upon a time, that you could tell how much someone earned by how they spend their spare time, it no longer is. Hunting and fishing, RVing, camping and canoeing, dogsled and snowmobile racing — these are now the working-class pursuits of rather well-off people. A canoe trip on a river in the Northwest will set you back $6,000 or $7,000, while a week at a salmon lodge on the Restigouche River in New Brunswick starts at around $10,000. And has anyone priced a racing-quality snowmobile recently, not to mention a class-A motorhome? In comparison, the stereotypically urban fondness for egg-white omelets and yoga classes looks downright frugal.
In the end, the candidacy of Sarah Palin didn’t herald a re-engagement of the culture wars but their exhaustion. What forty years of arguing over authenticity in American politics has boiled down to is a disagreement over who has better leisure pursuits. It’s no longer a dispute over fundamental values, a fight to the death for the soul of America. Instead, Sarah Palin turned it into a dinnerparty argument about who has better taste.
Nothing more perfectly characterized Palin’s impact on the American political scene than her leaving of it, however temporary her departure may turn out to be. When she abruptly resigned as governor of Alaska just halfway through her first term, there was a great deal of speculation about her motives. Was she tired of the endless attacks on her family? Was she the target of a secret FBI investigation? Or was she merely stepping back from the fray in order to get a running leap at the presidency in 2012?
Her behavior at the press conference in which she announced she was stepping down didn’t do much except confirm that when it comes to speaking her mind, she makes men such as Biden and McCain look like models of discretion and sober second thought. Her speech was a meandering rant of bitterness and indignation, aimed at anyone who ever drank a cappuccino, looked down at Alaska, or worked as a journalist. When it came to the only thing anyone really wanted to know — why she was quitting — she went off on some gonzo basketball analogy about how a good point guard knows when to protect the ball and when to pass it off for the good of the team.
At that moment, it became clear that Sarah Palin wasn’t simply making things up as she went along. Instead, it would seem that she’s as much a bystander to her own consciousness as the rest of us; stuff just comes out of her mouth and she lets other people figure out what to make of it. Whatever it is, it sure was spontaneous. But as Dahlia Lithwick wrote in a column for Slate magazine, the problem with this approach is that while “it’s all well and good to be mavericky with one’s policies, it’s never smart to be mavericky with one’s message.”
We seem to have reached an impasse. On the one hand, many of us find ourselves alienated from a political system that is so tightly messaged that all of the life seems to have been squeezed out of it. Yet at the same time, the candidacy of someone such as Sarah Palin is the reductio ad absurdum of the conceit that the simple willingness to speak one’s mind is what people mean when they say they want more Turnip Day moments from their leaders.
Begin with the obvious point, which is that nobody sets out to do “fake politics.” Every rising star in the political heavens arrives on the promise to “do politics differently,” which is code for “I won’t lie, dissemble, waffle, temporize, flip-flop, or otherwise mislead you.” The promise is that they will do politics differently by being direct, honest, and courageous and by simply being themselves. The pledge to do politics differently usually lasts for about a month, until an off-the-cuff remark or straight ahead answer to a question is twisted by the media into a “gaffe.” (As the saying goes, in politics a gaffe is when someone tells the truth.) At this point, the politician either learns to survive by mastering the fine art of laying smoke, or he or she crashes to Earth, dismissed by the public as an error-prone buffoon or a dangerous wingnut.
In truth, a great share of the blame lies with the media and its obsession with controversy and scandal at the expense of more difficult question of policy and other serious issues. The press lies in wait, ready to pounce on anything that can be labeled a gaffe, which causes their prey to stick ever closer to the protection of their talking points. The politicians end up looking more and more like brainless automata, which leads the public to treat them with increasing contempt. The fact is, politicians and the press are locked in a Mexican standoff. It is a race to the bottom that no one can win, but neither side has any incentive to stop.
The second difficulty has to do with the attitudes of the public. Do we want a leader to be himself? When Stephen Harper took over as prime minister of Canada in 2006, he was a fashion disaster. At one early press conference he wore a gold golf shirt that showed off his jiggling man boobs, photographs of which were widely circulated and published in the satirical press. On an official visit to Mexico, he wore a khaki fishing vest that made him look like George W. Bush and Vicente Fox’s dim-witted little brother. Harper became an object of ridicule for being himself, and there are few men out there who could withstand that much heckling and not turn to an image consultant for help.
Do we want spontaneity? While campaigning in the spring of 2007, John McCain was asked if he had any ideas for how to deal with Iran and its refusal to stop enriching uranium. He picked up the microphone and immediately broke into song, singing “Bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys hit “Barbara Ann.” His audience laughed, but as the incident rippled through the blogosphere, it only reinforced the widespread belief that he was a bit too crazy to be president.
The most damning example of our two-faced attitude toward spontaneity, though, is the stunning rise and incredible flameout of Howard Dean. A six-term governor of Vermont, Dean ran for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2004. He advocated a “50 State Strategy” that would see the Democratic Party fighting for votes in traditional Republican strongholds, and he pioneered the online fundraising model that Obama would use so successfully four years later. He was an early leader in the race, and for a while it looked like he might run away with the nomination. Until, that is, an unfortunate night in Iowa, when Dean finished a disappointing third in the state’s caucuses, behind John Kerry and John Edwards.
At an evening rally for his supporters, Dean gave a speech in which he vowed to carry on the fight. As he got increasingly worked up, his face got red and his throat tightened, until he started yelling about how “we’re going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we’re going to California and Texas and New York … And we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we’re going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! Yeah!!!”
That final “yeah!” sounded like a pig being strangled, and it punctuated what Dean himself later conceded was “a crazy, red-faced rant.” A clip of the speech was played repeatedly on TV, and then it was posted on YouTube, where it was remixed and repackaged as “The Dean Scream.” Dean hung on for another month, but his candidacy effectively ended that night, his credibility as a man in control of his emotions completely shot.
The truth is, we say we desire more authenticity in our politics, but when push comes to shove, we want authenticity only when it mirrors our own narrow values and ideals. The reason politicians hire image consultants and stick doggedly to their talking points is that spontaneity and frank talk is punished far more frequently than it is rewarded. That is why it is the public, not the spin doctors or the media, who are to blame for a political culture that is as bland and homogeneous as fast food and DIY furniture. Like McDonald’s or Ikea, political leaders are trying to appeal to as many people as possible without turning anyone off. Worse, they have the additional burden of trying to do it under the omnipresent and omni-hostile gaze of a media that will rip them apart at the slightest misstep. Given the alternatives, it is easy to see how a $400 haircut and full-time image consultant may start to look like a bargain.
During the 1993 Canadian federal election, the incumbent Progressive Conservative Party ran a series of attack ads against Jean Chrétien, the leader of the opposition Liberals. The second ad consisted of a number of closeup photographs of Chrétien’s face, his face twisted in an apparent sneer, with one side of his mouth open wide, the other almost shut. A succession of voice-overs criticized Chrétien’s policies but also asked rhetorical questions such as, “Is this a prime minister?” Most of it was fair game by the relatively unsporting rules of politics, but the last comment in the ad — “I would be very embarrassed if he became prime minister of Canada” — caused problems. The photos used in the ad weren’t just bad candids; Chrétien does have a slight facial deformity, the result of Bell’s palsy, which he has had since he was a teenager. It becomes more prominent when he is speaking loudly.
There was an immediate backlash against this form of “negative campaigning,” and Prime Minister Kim Campbell immediately ordered the ad off the air. Her handlers complained that the backlash was largely a media creation, but the damage was done. As one pundit put it, Chrétien went on to make the speech he had been waiting his entire career to deliver, telling a Nova Scotia audience: “When I was a kid people were laughing at me. But I accepted that because God gave me other qualities and I’m grateful.” Members of the audience had tears in their eyes. After nine years of tumultuous rule, the Tories were always going to have a hard time retaining power, even with a new leader. But after the fiasco over the attack ad against Jean Chrétien, the party never recovered in the polls and the Liberals went on to win in a landslide. The former government was almost destroyed as a party, reduced to only two seats in a 295-member House of Commons.
This affair appears to illustrate the widespread conviction that the public does not approve of attack ads and will punish parties who are deemed to have crossed the line of good taste and fair play. One of the eternal verities of elections is that, at the beginning of every campaign, each party solemnly swears that they intend to run a clean, positive campaign. And if they end up in the gutter, it is because their opponent dragged them down into it. “Going negative” is usually interpreted as a sign that a campaign is in trouble, a desperate gamble that if everyone ends up covered in mud, the public won’t really care who threw the first handful.
Almost every losing party or candidate eventually gets desperate, which may explain why we have some negative campaigning. But that does not explain why there is so much of it or why attack ads make up an increasingly large proportion of all campaign advertising. According to a study by Brown University professor Darrell West, negative advertising in U.S. presidential elections climbed steeply in the 1970s. In 1976, 35 per cent of all major ads were negative, rising to 60 per cent in 1980, 74 per cent in 1984, and 83 per cent in 1988. That was the high-water mark until 2004, when the Bush–Kerry mudfight set new standards for negativity.
So the public strongly dislikes attack ads, and politicians themselves say they would rather not run them. Furthermore, they are widely blamed by academics and journalists for lowering the level of civility in public discourse, hurting voter turnout, and alienating citizens from their elected representatives and democratic institutions. So why is there so much of it about?
The straightforward answer, as any political strategist will tell you, is that they work. “Positive” ads, which are usually warm and fuzzy spots talking about how the sun will shine brighter and the birds will sing sweeter only if Pat Smith gets elected, are generally ignored by a skeptical public. But when Chris Jones criticizes the record or impugns the character of Pat Smith, people stop and pay attention. As one veteran political consultant argues, “People always say they hate it when newspapers print photographs of car crashes, too. And then, when they’re near a car crash, the same folks slow down to take a good look.” Even the man responsible for the notorious ad making fun of Jean Chrétien’s facial deformity agrees. Allan Gregg, a pollster and market research consultant in Toronto, continues to insist that the ad would have worked if it had been allowed to run longer. Gregg thinks the uproar was largely a creation of the media, and it wasn’t the ad that caused the damage but Kim Campbell’s decision to “wear” the backlash by pulling the ad off the air.
The fact that they work would certainly explain the prevalence (if not the popularity) of negative political advertising, but this only pushes the question back a step. Why do they work? Part of the answer has to do with some of the peculiar ways in which political marketing differs from conventional commercial advertising. But odd as it may sound, much of the blame must lie with our very desire for more Turnip Day moments from our politicians, because the murky depths of “authenticity” is where the character assassins of negative advertising make their home.
A lot of political advertising gets labeled negative when it isn’t. A study by the Annenberg Campaign Mapping Project usefully sorts political messaging into three types: advocacy messages, which give arguments in favor of a politician’s position; contrast messages, which contrast two or more positions or choices; and attack ads, which are straightforwardly critical of an opponent’s position or character.
One of the more jarring features of political advertising is how different it is from the more familiar commercial variety. The identity of a strong commercial brand, such as Apple, Coca-Cola, or Volvo, is established almost entirely through positive or “advocacy” marketing. The brand’s identity, or “unique selling proposition,” is created through spots that deliver a clear and consistent message about the product’s position in the marketplace. Every Coca-Cola ad builds on the idea that Coke embodies authenticity, and each Volvo campaign supports the promise that their cars mean safety. Overwhelmingly, commercial advertising sticks to the rule that you never mention the competition: Sprite doesn’t run spots showing a kid at a birthday party taking a sip of 7-Up, then promptly barfing all over the cake. Adidas does not have a campaign that features cops chasing violent criminals through the streets, only to come up short because they couldn’t run fast enough in their Nikes.
In fact, if you ask people to think of negative commercial advertising, almost everyone mentions the Pepsi Challenge (if they can remember that far back), or another more recent example, Apple’s Get a Mac campaign, which shows a hip, casual, laidback Mac guy interacting with a stuffy, uptight, work-obsessed PC person. But neither of these are genuine negative or attack ads; they are actually contrastive spots that promote the merits of one brand over another. True negative advertising, where one player in an industry goes flat out against a competitor, is almost unheard of in the commercial realm.
One major reason is the sheer number of competitors. Down at the food court, you can choose from McDonald’s, Burger King, Harvey’s, or Wendy’s, and that’s just if you are in the mood for a burger. So if McDonald’s runs a negative ad against Burger King, it could give customers a reason to avoid the Whopper, but they may very well head over to & for a Mama Burger. Meanwhile, in North American politics at least, the only serious choice open to voters is Democratic or Republican in the United States, Liberal or Conservative in Canada, and a reason for not voting for one is implicitly a reason for voting for the other. It is like in church, where the choice is between either God or Satan. It is all well and good to preach to the choir about the glory of God, but it also helps to occasionally remind the flock about what a bad guy the devil is.
What’s distinctive about the commercial realm is that the size of the market is not fixed, and a successful brand can actually create a niche in which many competitors can flourish. In fact, one of the “immutable laws” of branding is that a leading brand should promote the product or service category as a whole. The idea is that if you build up overall market awareness, the brand leader will benefit disproportionately — think of what Starbucks did for coffee or what Red Bull has done for energy drinks. The corollary of this explains why there’s so little negative advertising in the shopping mall. Why doesn’t Kenneth Cole go after Ralph Lauren? Because it would run the risk of turning the public off the entire category and shrinking sales for all concerned.
In contrast, politics is a business where power is the only spoils. And since you either have power or you have nothing, it means that, unlike the market for coffee or burgers, politics is a zero-sum game. All that matters is winning, and there is no risk of shrinking the entire market by running down your competitors. Under these conditions, negative advertising becomes an absolutely necessary weapon in your communications arsenal.
Finally, another significant difference between politics and commerce is that while the fight for market share in the supermarket is a ceaseless battle, politics consists of long periods of monopoly power punctuated by short bouts of heavyweight competition. If the supermarkets were to periodically hold a six-month long contest during which consumers would vote on which cola would own the supermarkets of the nation for the next four years, you would see a heck of a lot more negative campaigning. In particular, the loser of the previous “election” would probably spend most of the campaign criticizing the taste of the winning cola and denouncing the corporate owner for being lazy and arrogant and taking the consumer for granted.
As for the notion that negative advertising is a poisoned chalice that in the end only harms democracy, this is certainly the received wisdom about negative campaigning. In Politics Lost, Joe Klein laments the influence of the Democratic strategist Patrick Caddell, a genius of negative campaigning who came to “the perverse realization that he could make the race so obnoxious that he would actively discourage people from voting.”
This is a depressing observation, but also perhaps a mistaken one. For one thing, studies of the content of political advertising in the United States show that negative ads actually have more factual content, and deal with more policy issues, than other forms of communication. But more interesting still is new research that has found that the more people dislike the candidates and supporters of the other parties, the more likely they are to vote. This suggests that, if anything, negative campaigning should increase voter turnout.
But is voter turnout such a good measure of the health of a country’s democracy? If history is any guide, there is such a thing as a society that is too politically engaged. In Weimar-era Germany, virtually every institution of civil society, from gyms to music groups to outing clubs was organized along partisan lines. In this overheated democracy, where voter turnout in even the most minor elections was routinely more than 80 per cent, Germans became accustomed to the idea that just about everything you did in the public sphere was at least an implicit reflection of your political leanings. The fact that German society was already so heavily politicized made it that much easier for the Nazis to “coordinate” these institutions once they gained power, because it wasn’t so much a matter of introducing politics into civil society, as simply Nazifying institutions that were already politically compromised.
So the prevalence of attack ads has something to do with both the nature of the spoils and the incentive structure of the political marketplace, but what probably exerts an even greater influence is the very desire for more authenticity in our politics. Remember that the supposed virtue of Turnip Day moments is that they reveal gaps in the armor, which afford a window into a politician’s true self. It is after the speechwriters and handlers have gone to bed, when they have had a few drinks or are really wound up, that politicians allow themselves those moments of spontaneity that reveal their real character, their deeper humanity.
This assumes that “humanity” is somehow self-revealing, that you know it when you see it. But like the ad man said, if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made, and the two most successful American politicians of the past thirty years, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, were in a league of their own when it came to faking sincerity. Worse, even if character were self-revealing, nothing says we are going to like what we see. Some of us have a heart of gold, others a heart of darkness, and once we decide that character is a chief reason for voting for one candidate and rejecting another, the table is set for one hell of a food fight. If character matters, then the moral valence of that character matters, and it becomes a legitimate target of attack ads. In fact, once authenticity becomes a much-prized quality in our leaders, attack ads become not just likely, but obligatory. For example, during his 2008 primaries battle with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama was caught cribbing a few lines for a speech from his friend Deval Patrick. Clinton was quick to pounce, arguing that this “plagiarism” was no mere dishonesty; it actually undermined “the entire premise of his candidacy.” Clinton had a point: since plagiarism is passing off the work of another as your own, it is a crime against authenticity, and authenticity was a major element of Obama’s brand.
The same danger awaits anyone who rests his or her case for public office on their character. If a Rudy Giuliani–type of politician chooses to run for president on his reputation as a man of strength and integrity, then the fact that he and his wife have six marriages between them becomes a legitimate matter of public interest and concern. If a John Kerry decides to base his entire campaign on his service in Vietnam, then the nature of that service, and the character he exhibited while in-country, is something that has to be critically examined.
This fixation on authenticity explains why “hypocrisy” has become the greatest political vice. A political hypocrite is someone who supports one set of moral rules or principles that should apply to the general public, while adhering to a separate (and usually more lax) moral code in their private life. For obvious reasons, social conservatives are most at risk here, and when it was revealed that William Bennett (author of numerous books on America’s supposed moral collapse) had a long-standing gambling addiction, the liberal press and public delighted in having unmasked him as a hypocrite.
Unfortunately, this puts politics into a death spiral. A fixation on authenticity and a candidate’s character creates an opening for attack ads by the opposition. But this in turn gives a candidate an incentive to lie about his past or hide his true character, which provides jobs for all the spin doctors and image consultants whom nobody likes. In the end, Joe Klein has it exactly backward: it isn’t the spin doctors who have drained the authenticity from politics; rather, it is the desire for authenticity that provides opportunities for men who can help you fake it. The only alternative is to vote only for candidates who are so upright, honest, and unimpeachably dull that you wouldn’t want them having supper with you, let alone running the country.