COMMENTARY : The Shootout : Tough Guys Do Dance . . . When TV Calls the Tune

In political debates, we look for how well a candidate will articulate his (or her) position. Tonight we’ll be watching the match-up between Michael Dukakis and George Bush with something different in mind; as Butch Cassidy said to the Sundance Kid in the face of a thundering, baleful fate, “Who are these guys?”

The Hollywood reference is not accidental. Where once we relied on the media--principally the camera--to probe and reveal, now, as far as presidential politics is concerned, we’re shunted further and further out of direct line-of-sight with the object of our scrutiny, which the camera now coddles. If imagery is essence in modern politics, so is another suspect Hollywood conceit that our candidates like to play up wherever possible: machismo expressiveness.

To watch Dukakis out on his daily “power walk” recalls the brisk strolls Harry Truman took when he was president. Truman would burst out on to Madison Avenue (when he was staying at New York’s Carlyle Hotel) and dispense plain-speaking quips to the posse of reporters struggling to keep up while writing in their notebooks--an image roughly equivalent to Woody Allen’s attempt to play cello in a marching band.

In those days, that swift exercise was called a “morning constitutional.” It’s intriguing that the phrase should now be upgraded to equate the notion of taking a walk with an expression of power, particularly since Dukakis looks a little ridiculous clutching his Yuppie handweights while stepping along like an aging boy in short pants at the head of a phalanx of Secret Service agents.

But that’s the age we’ve been living in since 1968, when a group of TV image-specialists convinced candidate Richard Nixon that if reality is a matter of perception, then truth is a matter of selective imagery. (President Eisenhower had an ad agency working for him, but it seemed a good deal less bent on fabricating phony “scenarios.”)

These advisers took their clue from Marshall McLuhan, the professor and media guru who vividly defined our relationship to television as a revolutionary medium: “Policies and issues are useless for election purposes, since they are too specialized and hot,” McLuhan wrote. “The shaping of a candidate’s integral image has taken the place of discussing conflicting points of view.”

Daniel Boorstin, in a prelude to the Nixon campaign, observed, “In the last half-century, the old heroic mold has been broken. A new mold has been made, so that marketable human models--modern ‘heroes’--could be mass-produced, to satisfy the market, and without any hitches. The qualities which now make a man or a woman into a ‘nationally advertised’ brand are in fact a new category of human emptiness.”

Ray Price, a former newspaper editorial writer who composed much of Nixon’s 1968 Inaugural address, noted, “The natural human use of reason is to support prejudice, not to arrive at opinions. . . . We have to be clear that the (voter) response is to the image, not the man.”

Nixon, of course, won the election, sanctifying the idea that packaging is all in modern politics--whose perfect apotheosis is an actor in the White House.

We saw George Bush on the cover of Newsweek, in a bright yellow oilskin, peering over the wheel of his yacht with purposefully narrowed eyes into a seascape that reduces man to a Hemingwayesque essence of sea and sky and the suggestion of a lone symbolic wayfarer sailing the Earth’s wild waters. (Forget the photographer hunched over the keel straining for the shot; our suspension of disbelief is required here.) The caption under the photo cried, “Fighting the Wimp Factor.”

Most of us are aware that contemporary politics is indeed mostly imagery rather than content--the expression of power is always modified by ritual, and our sense of community now isn’t gained through books and town meetings or even newspapers as much as it is by TV. Hardly anyone now is unmindful of the terms “sound bite” and “photo opportunity” or the concept of the orchestrated PR event. The basis of the idea is as old as political pageantry itself, when the comings and goings of kings were preceded by overtures of heraldry and the issuing of their edicts was couched in pomp.

Nor is the notion of empty official symbolism novel. In “The Balcony,” playwright Jean Genet dressed three bordello customers to step out and impersonate a general, a religious leader and a head of state to maintain the illusion of order in the face of a nation’s chaos. (Apparently it worked; Genet was a fabulous ironist.)

Why is it that our leadership, which has apocalyptic destructive power at its fingertips and lives in a more populous, dangerous and complicated geopolitical state than ever, needs to play up the blunt simplicity of a stone macho image, which looks to Hollywood--which has its own macho complex--for its tailoring?

Henry Kissinger has said, “I’ve always acted alone. Americans like the cowboy, who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse.”

Is there anything more incongruous than the picture of Henry the K in a cowboy hat riding into town on a horse: “Visskey, please.”

Richard Nixon is reported to have watched the movie “Patton” in order to screw his courage to the sticking point in the bombing of Cambodia. Ronald Reagan stares down Congress with Dirty Harry’s (Clint Eastwood) challenge, “Make my day.” George Bush also echoes Harry when he says, “Read my lips.”

The overt image may be downloading at the moment. In his TV ads Bush now tells us he’s “a gentle man” while children climb all over him. Magazine articles appoint Kitty Dukakis as fire to her husband’s ice. But still we see attempts to feminize the opposition. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, calls the Democrats “the party of the homosexuals” (unmindful of the number of gays prominently identified with the Republican Party). Bush still struggles with the image of wimp, and we’re fully apprised of the select staff that writes his speeches and advises him on how to maintain command presence so that his voice doesn’t curl up into shrillness. Dukakis is falsely charged with having consulted a psychotherapist--real men don’t see shrinks. What ended Sen. Edmund Muskie’s presidential bid in 1968? He wept in public over a cruel remark about his wife. He was ill-equipped to deal with the true depth of human nastiness in a political campaign. Suck it up, Ed. This is hardball.

Both Dukakis and Bush have been coached to say as little as possible. That’s the legacy of 1968, where a same-sounding speech can be gussied up with pictures to astonishing effect. But their talk of “leadership” doesn’t seem to go to the root of anything, least of all their role as good guys and tough guys. (What is Dukakis trying to prove, decked out in his tank commander’s cap?)

Maybe that’s why shipyard workers in Oregon yell derisively at Bush, and anti-abortionists try to break up a Dukakis speech instead of engaging him in debate. Maybe that’s why “the people” (as we saw in Dan Quayle’s staged response to questions about his National Guard service) shout down the media; it’s losing its role as true ombudsman for getting at the heart of things.

People are fed up. They’re not buying the threadbare slogans and the staged images anymore. They know they’re being manipulated and they’re tired of it. That’s why five mid-September polls on candidate preference show five different results; nobody sees authentic leadership in these characters.

Each candidate talks about managing “our role in a changing world,” but neither appears up to challenging the fake mythologies that inform it, or of pointing to culture as a civilizing influence and a universal human link. That might be asking too much. After all, only a visionary could address the 20th Century’s mightiest form of expressiveness: priapic technology. What’s a poem compared to a rocket ship? asks Saul Bellow. In modern America, a poem is “a skirt thing.”

There’s no arguing that in this campaign, which is generally characterized as a rattle of sound bites between two PR camps, no one is exercising the genuinely soul-stirring function of true leadership: a mythic appeal that binds human beings in a sense of personal and shared destiny.

These tough guys don’t dance to the music of real time. They don’t point us to a generous horizon. They carp about the Pledge. They snicker at each other. What is there, in the selling of the President 1988, to disabuse us of the notion that this category of human emptiness is no longer new?