Interestingly, Dean protected, to a nearly unprecedented degree, his and his family's privacy from media inquiry. As a result, there was very little in the way of character construction, and even less in the way of biographical storytelling, in his campaign; Dean's "backstage" story was off limits entirely. Except for his passion about foreign policy, health care, and "special interests," voters were offered little information about him and nothing personal at all.
In the end, however, a Dean "character" emerged anyway. Candidates cannot insulate themselves from political coverage that has become nearly ubiquitous. A TV camera is rolling virtually everywhere, and on those occasions when it's not, there's a blogger, a laptop, and a digital camera nearby. Dean's mediated "character" -- especially footage in which he rudely ordered a hostile elderly voter in Iowa to sit down and shut up -- apparently struck many people as intemperate, arrogant, and abrasive. (Also in Iowa, Dean engaged in an exchange of negative ads with the Dick Gephardt campaign, a media war that has repeatedly and plausibly been blamed for undermining the appeal of both candidates.)
Dean's efforts to address his persona problems came too late. In the course of the New Hampshire campaign, where he attempted to make adjustments in the wake of his Hawkeye State disaster, Dean fed his wife (who had otherwise been invisible) into the maw of a Diane Sawyer interview, identified himself as a "hockey dad," and, though he was among the more cerebral candidates in years, analyzed himself as too often "leading with his heart." (His wife allowed that he "is a good dancer.") Apparently concerned that his candidacy had developed minimal appeal to female voters, Dean began making New Hampshire appearances in the company of his mother. But it's far more difficult to build a positive "backstage" persona when voters already have assembled a negative one, and Dean's attempt came to nothing.
Obviously, the major echo left behind by the Dean campaign is the manic Iowa Scream that followed his deflating third-place finish in that state's caucuses. But the singular focus on that memorable performance tended to obscure the more important fact that Dean, to the consternation of much of the gatekeeper press, already had faded as a candidate before he started screaming. The moral? If you don't shape your own persona and tell your own story, these don't become nonfactors. Rather, character and narrative become factors over which the campaign has surrendered control.
Of course, Dean did offer a series of high-profile endorsements, including one from Al Gore. All that accomplished, however, was to demonstrate that in an age of political intimacy, personal endorsements don't mean anything. Dean's was a campaign that understood one technological revolution -- the Internet and its organizational opportunities -- extremely well, but ignored the demands of the remainder of the technological environment.
Edwards the Empath
The case of North Carolina Sen. John Edwards represents the flip side of Dean's failed campaign. Edwards' early candidacy was largely ignored by the mainstream press, yet he was able to connect with voters and establish his political credibility directly. How? It wasn't on the basis of his political credentials; Edwards entered the race as a retiring first-term senator without much of a record to brag about. It wasn't his effective organization either; Edwards didn't have much organization at all. Nor was it his history of leadership; Edwards made no such claim. What he had (along with money from his fellow trial lawyers) was a remarkable talent for storytelling.
The central pillar of Edwards' campaign was The Speech. We live, Edwards told audiences in every state, in Two Americas, one of them with good schools, good health care, etc.; the other without. The first America, the one where all the institutions work, exists for the benefit of the wealthy and privileged; the other America, where nothing works as well as it should, is for "everybody else." Furthermore, Edwards identified himself throughout the speech with "everybody else," focusing on his roots in "a rural mill town" in South Carolina where honest, simple people worked hard but eventually lost their jobs to impersonal globalization. Who can fix this broken country? According to his speech, Edwards can't do it alone, but all of us working together can "lift up" America.
It was a simple populist message, flavored with phrases borrowed from the rural Southern church and built on a well-worn political premise. (Benjamin Disraeli had used the trope of "two Britains" in the 19th century.) Yet the power of the speech is demonstrable: Edwards succeeded in melding a social and economic vision with an autobiographical story and, drawing on his experience as a jury-swaying trial lawyer, used his message to communicate empathy with his listeners. The speech was a startling performance in a post-rhetorical age; by all accounts it deeply impressed voters and even cynical political journalists, who never wrote a negative story about him. It catapulted Edwards into the role of major contender, despite his obvious lack of credentials for the office he sought, and it helped him survive the loss of all but one of the first 20 party primaries and caucuses.
Edwards' success in keeping his campaign going is evidence of the rise of a new political type made possible in a context of media intimacy. A variety of rhetorical and behavioral styles have dominated the presidency's two centuries. William Jennings Bryan and Jimmy Carter offered an essentially religious model; William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge adopted the public attitude of the taciturn businessman; Woodrow Wilson and Adlai Stevenson were professorial. A fading type, historically speaking, has been the military leader; a rising type, especially within the Democratic Party, has been the policy wonk.
Edwards represents a type that has emerged only recently: the Empath, a candidate who can identify not just with voters' interests but with their emotions. The original political Empath was, of course, Bill Clinton, whose claims to feeling the nation's pain became a source of parody. The power of the type, however, can be measured by its effect on a decade of American political competition, including the first campaign of George W. Bush. In the 2000 campaign, even a Republican like Bush attempted to apply the rising trope of empathy by building a campaign on sustained claims to "compassion" and by making the welfare of children (another Clinton specialty) a cornerstone of his promised policy initiatives.
Men of Feeling
This political pattern, involving empathy and a continuous policy reference to children, has led Carnes Lord of the Naval War College to speculate about the ongoing "feminization" of American politics. In The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now, Lord argues that the foundations of the traditional leadership role have shifted, especially in nations that are dominated by a large, self-confident, and prosperous middle class. Would-be leaders of such societies can no longer draw on old-fashioned social hierarchies to justify their roles, and it is increasingly difficult to use war leadership as a model.
Lord is right. For much of the 20th century, would-be presidents sought to communicate the resolution they would bring to conflicts, both hot and cold, against a series of military and ideological rivals. Resolution, however, has given way to "compassion," even in the first Democratic presidential primary season since the September 11 attacks.
"Feminization," by the way, is a known cultural phenomenon involving a public shift in sensibility and the acceptable display of emotion. (Although feminization is sometimes used negatively or with misogynist overtones, in this case the term is strictly descriptive.) Great Britain experienced "feminization" in the 18th century, primarily through the influence of popular literature; it led to the appearance of the empathetic (and often lachrymose) Man of Feeling. The United States was to go through a similar cultural experience in the mid-19th century, also under the influence of (mostly) female writers and novelists. The phenomenon had important social and political consequences in both societies; it was part of the shift in outlook on the part of wealthier and more powerful classes toward the poor, women, slaves, and a variety of outgroups, and helped enable an era of expanding rights and socially corrective legislation. It's interesting that the transformation of presidential candidates into Men of Feeling has waited until so recently, but it is further evidence that politics have absorbed a cultural dynamic.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
nfl jerseys|11.8.10 @ 3:36AM|#
vrgfd