Nothing Succeeds Like Sincerity--Even If Faked : Politics: Voters want to know the deepest feelings of the candidates. But is that really any clue to what their policies will ultimately be?

After the second presidential debate, the one like a TV talk show, with real people asking questions, an audience member was questioned by the press about Bill Clinton’s fluent performance: Was it too smooth? Did he seem coached? “I think the people that were coaching (him) have done a marvelous job,” the woman answered, “I was impressed that he could pull it off and make it look sincere.”

That’s how this campaign is ending. Despite a fair amount of attention to The Issues, the contest’s final days dramatize the continuing power of character questions--about honesty, sincerity, spontaneity and the like--in our politics. Clinton still looks like the winner on Election Day. But the gap in the polls between him and George Bush has shrunk, and it has done so because of voters’ accumulated doubts about Clinton’s personal integrity. Many voters clearly think they have not been able to look beyond the campaign artifice into Clinton’s essential nature. And they are nervous voting for an individual they do not feel this intimate connection with.

They--we--had better grow up. For more than 200 years, technology has steadily enlarged our capacity to peer into our politicians’ lives and motives. Just as steadily, the politicians have outwitted us, figuring out how to use each new technique for their own advantage while making sure their secrets stay secret.

The role a political leader plays in the life of the nation probably depends less on his personal attributes--from style of dress to nobility of soul--than on his and his colleagues’ ideas, on the opportunities presented to him and on his skill in practicing the low arts by which politicians get things done. To understand Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty or Richard M. Nixon’s desegregation of the South, we need to know more about the political traditions and calculations that drove these men than we do about their appearance or inner-most thinking about race. Does it matter that Bush is a “moderate” if his policies aren’t?

Yet voters always look for a President who is human enough for us to love yet noble enough so that he will not abuse his power out of selfish ambition. Politicians, for their part, try to look as if they are complying.

George Washington and his fellow Founders, seeking to strengthen their popular connections, quite deliberately had their portraits painted, copied and circulated for inspection by the public. Washington was also known as a man who disdained public life. But, according to contemporary John Adams, this attitude was part of a calculated pose. In fact, said Adams, Washington was the “best actor of presidency we have ever had.”

And that was our golden age of political nobility. Thereafter, things went downhill. Democratization transformed the relationship between leaders and citizens, and in the mid-19th Century, the painted portrait gave way to the more democratic photograph. A politician’s visual image became a far more important part of his success. Because of the camera’s close vantage point, a political leader had to appear less heroic and more approachable.

Abraham Lincoln, for one, adapted brilliantly to this more detailed inspection. He grew his famous beard after being told it would make him more politically appealing to the ladies. In Matthew Brady’s photographs of him, Lincoln appears in the honest-looking clothes and posture of an ordinary man. His demeanor is one of brooding distance that sets him apart from daily political life and the personal ambition that drives it.

Over the next century, our view was steadily magnified, but we did not really get any nearer to our politicians’ souls. Candidates had to offer us more details of their domestic life--dogs, grandchildren, relatives’ drug dependencies--to satisfy our demand for empathetic closeness. Perversely, all this prying put politicians “on stage” more than ever. They spent more time in performance and less on spontaneity.

In the 1880s, newspapers started regularly printing photographs of presidents’ activities. The system promptly brought forth President Theodore Roosevelt, father of the modern photo opportunity. In the 20th Century, newsreels put the presidency into motion; Franklin D. Roosevelt used them self-consciously and triumphantly. John F. Kennedy, of course, came to us courtesy of television. He fashioned a persona that exploited it perfectly. Sometimes he sought counsel from show-business stars.

Now, in reaction to post-Watergate journalism, we are entering the era of the politically relevant talk show. The questions are sometimes softer than those journalists ask, but a politician on one of these shows is exposed to close public view for quite a long time. Viewers like this innovation. They ask their own questions. They get more of a psychological connection to the candidates seeking their votes.

But this new kind of exposure, like its predecessors, will simply produce politicians good at manipulating it. These politicians will not be like Bush, who still stumbles when he tries to project the folksy sincerity and easy intimacy that talk shows require. No, the new politicians will be more like Clinton--who has a graceful informality, who is comfortable with the language of psychology, who has thought through the answers to embarrassing questions, who delivers his replies smoothly and who knows how to move to another topic without looking shamed or caught off guard.

The new politicians will be able to stand up to a camera lens powerful enough to show us their pores. Yet we will look at them and realize, somehow, that we know no more about them and their interior lives than we do about the old unimproved model. In fact, we will suspect that they perform so well because they live even more of their lives on stage--and have even less of a self separate from their performances.

“Sincerity,” said the great George Burns, “is the secret of success. If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.” For the same reason, looking for sincerity in politicians won’t do the rest of us any good. We will end up knowing less about them than voters knew about Washington. And we will be governed by leaders who are manipulative in ways Washington could never have imagined.