Shortly before I stopped appearing on television on a sort-of-regular basis, I was given some advice by an old pro. He told me whenever I was asked a question on camera, I should say the first thing that popped into my head. Say it forcefully, and don’t qualify it, even if I realize it is an essentially stupid thing to say.
And I should stick to it—at least until the next time I went on television.
That I didn’t quite understand this speaks to my own naivete. A television host must always care more about producing a good show than fruitfully contributing to civic discourse. Whatever else I imagined myself to be, the truth was that when I was on this particular host’s program my job was to arrest the interest of an audience. If I could do this by making cogent, subtle points about the way we live now through easily digestible soundbites, that was great. But the important thing was not to slow the show down. I could tease out the complications of the positions I’d abruptly taken on my own time.
Best as anyone can tell, it was political strategist Paul Begala who was first quoted as saying, “Politics is show business for ugly people.” (Begala doesn’t take credit for minting the cliche; he allows he may have first heard it in a bar in Texas in the ’80s. I may have first heard it under similar circumstances about the same time.)
It’s what you call a “truism” because it fairly describes the known world; actors and politicians tend to be needy folks whose success is at least a little dependent on being in the right place at the right time. Still, “ugly” is a relative and not entirely helpful term. Let’s just say that anyone who hopes to attain national office is compelled to craft an image—a fictional avatar—for the camera. The best candidates, who mightn’t be the best at governance, provide us with the most relatable brands. Like actors, they seek to enlist our empathy.
We tend to vote for people we like—or think we would like, given the chance to know them. In the days when people had very little opportunity to observe candidates, things like policy statements and voting records may have been more important than personal charisma and snappy soundbites, but with campaigns generally played out on TV, enthusiastically expressed certainty trumps thoughtfulness, and any sign of self-doubt will be taken as weakness.
Donald Trump may be a disingenuous attention seeker playing the role of a pro wrasslin’ heel, but he understands how television works. It’s more important for him to appear strongwilled and bumptious than reasonable. Reasonable isn’t his brand.
For reasons that aren’t always parsable, some people are just much better than others on camera (Bill Clinton comes across much better than Hillary Clinton does). But if there’s any correlation between being good on TV and good at governance, I have not seen it.
“Television, strange instrument, has its favorites, whom it somehow shows at their best, but it also has its stepchildren, and television had certainly done nothing for this man,” historian Eric Goldman, who served as “intellectual in residence” in Lyndon Baines Johnson’s administration, wrote in 1968. “It caught nothing of the sheer physical force emanating from him, the handsomeness, in its own way, of the strong-featured weathered face, the nuances that came in looks, gestures and intonations of the drawl.”
I remember Johnson on TV; he’s the first president I considered a fellow human. And I perceived him as a hound-faced man with thinning hair. He read as a hick in an era when television was full of unsophisticated rustics—The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres, Mayberry R.F.D, Gomer Pyle: USMC and the mostly forgotten O.K. Crackerby, which starred Burl Ives as an unlettered Oklahoma oil tycoon, were all on the air during his tenure in office.
Johnson was probably the last elected president we’ll see who didn’t show well on TV. Look at the folks who’ve held the office since television became ubiquitous: Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have about them the air of movie stars; Ronald Reagan actually was one. Despite his sometimes fractured syntax, George W. Bush isn’t far behind.
George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter are both avuncular Henry Fonda/ Jimmy Stewart types. (Carter’s failure to win re-election had as much to do with his image as a cardigan-affecting scold lecturing us on American problems such as the economy or the Iran hostage crisis; he came across as a real downer.)
Gerald Ford wasn’t elected, and Chevy Chase’s Saturday Night Live portrayal of him as a clumsy bumbler may have damaged his re-election chances as much as his pardon of Richard Nixon.
(Nixon, while he might seem to be an outlier, was actually a pioneer in the use of television as a political tool. His 1952 Checkers speech was a desperate attempt to convince Dwight Eisenhower to keep him on the Republican presidential ticket, but it ushered in a new type of campaigning as Nixon appealed to the cultural identity of what he’d later identify as the “silent majority”— people who wore Good Republican cloth coats and loved their dogs.)
While it’s obviously far too early in the process to make any sort of real guess about who will emerge as serious contenders in the 2016 presidential race, it’s fair to say that it won’t be any of television’s stepchildren. Calvin Coolidge or Woodrow Wilson couldn’t make it today.
Neither could Abraham Lincoln.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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