This Grand Old Tradition a Hard One for Candidates to Shake

As the rally crowd cheered, Al Gore scooped up Sarah Ambriz, a chubby-cheeked toddler in a leopard-print dress. The child’s grinning father was fumbling for his camera, but Gore had already turned toward the press. “Can you wave?” Gore whispered through a smile like some amateur ventriloquist. “Can you wave to them? Please?”

Sarah never waved, never even smiled, but that didn’t really matter.

Her father got a scrapbook memory, the vice president got another camera-ready, populist moment. And the news media brought home an image far more interesting than a candidate delivering a speech.

This dance is nothing new--”shaking hands and kissing babies” is a grand old tradition, after all--but in this era of prepackaged images, the human touch on the campaign trail has perhaps never been more important--or calculated.

Physical contact, campaign leaders know, creates visual metaphors and brings candidates--whether Democratic presidential nominee Gore or Republican nominee George W. Bush--closer to the public, both literally and figuratively.

A candidate shakes hundreds and hundreds of hands a day on the trail, but no matter how exhausting, the tradition is impossible to, well, shake. “I don’t think you could run for president and win if you didn’t shake hands or interact with people,” said Dennis Kinsey, who studies the image-building of candidates as an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University.

“As a culture, we pick up a lot of information based on perception and visual stimulus. That kind of universal communication and body language is a big part of the perception of a candidate.”

Watching Gore work the New Orleans crowd, Democratic Sen. John B. Breaux of Louisiana mused about the still-vital human touch factor in an age when television and modems would seem to put more distance between populace and politician.

“You have to touch people, you have to touch their hands and their hearts,” Breaux said. “In New Orleans, in Louisiana, if you don’t see and touch people--touch their hands, touch their hearts--then they don’t trust you.”

Gore and his phalanx of wary Secret Service agents finally retreat into the night after 15 minutes of post-speech crowd work.

“That man,” Breaux said, “has a callus on all 10 fingers.”

For Some Candidates, Touching Isn’t a Natural Thing

Bill Clinton perhaps set a new presidential standard for human touch with his bear hugs, charismatic crowd-working and ability to bond with people from different walks of life. But all this touching doesn’t come naturally to every candidate.

Take Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney. A serious, even stolid, man, the former secretary of Defense is more associated with policy than passion. That has shown too during this campaign.

There is, for example, his encounters with “tax families,” the married couples and their children tapped by the campaign to illustrate the boons of the GOP tax plans. While Cheney’s wife, Lynne, made a point of holding the little ones’ hands, Cheney did not. And at one stop, as a mother cradled her baby, Cheney reached out to the tyke and . . . shook the infant’s hand.

“I don’t kiss babies; I’m not a kisser,” Cheney explained weeks later when asked about his comfort working the “rope line,” as campaign veterans call it. In time, Cheney warmed to the constant handshaking.

“You have to get accustomed to it--at least I did,” Cheney said as his chartered plane shuttled between rallies in Kansas City, Mo., and Arkansas. “As a national candidate, I think you have to do it now. . . . I’m not sure that you could walk away from an event without it. If you didn’t do it, there would be a lot of comment.”

At rallies early on the trail, Cheney sometimes seemed a bit bewildered by the fervor of the surging crowds calling out to touch him, share a comment or get an autograph.

“It’s fascinating. I have been surprised at how intense it is for them,” he said. “When you get out there working the crowd after the speech and you’ve got people, five or six deep, pushing forward trying to reach you, to touch you, or they want you to touch their child . . . it’s a physical need.”

In the race’s final days, the excitement of true believers at rallies moved up considerably. At many events, Gore practically dived over the police railings to reach people back in the crowd--with Secret Service agents holding onto his belt loops to pull him back.

In Glen Ellyn, Ill., thousands of Texas Gov. Bush’s supporters recently packed the grassy commons of a junior college to see their candidate. Those in front jockeyed for position, stretching their arms, asking for autographs or just hoping to make eye contact.

Part of that passion is stirred by the culture of the day and the way leaders are presented and promoted like film or rock stars, Kinsey said.

“There is,” he said, “a component of celebrity to all this.”

And as is often the case with celebrity, there is something vaguely unsettling about all that adulation. That’s what longshot presidential candidate Alan Keyes found during the Republican primaries.

“I did have the sense that for us it felt like it was less about celebrity than that people had invested you with trust and their hopes, hopes that are so important to them,” Keyes said. “That’s a place that, as people, we’re not used to being--and it can be kind of frightening. But there is also this wonderful sense of being in touch with the people.”

The possibility of a presidential campaign without touching never got tested this year. Real estate tycoon Donald Trump, who has a famous phobia about shaking hands, had mulled a longshot bid for the White House. How he would have handled handshaking, which he has called a “barbaric,” germ-spreading custom, is anybody’s guess.

But for real campaigns, there’s no doubt that the human touch is carefully choreographed. Scheduling visits to schools, cancer centers, places of worship--all present contact images that speak, via photo or film, to voters.

Sometimes the touchy feely opportunities fall a bit flat, however. In September, Bush visited a nursery in Arkansas and cooed that “this is heaven, all kinds of babies to kiss.” He then left without smooching a single one.

Supporters Want to Touch Lives of Their Favorite Candidates Too

At every Bush and Gore event, parents bring their children with the hope for a chance meeting with the candidate who affects their lives--perhaps in the same way that Clinton’s famed boyhood handshake with John F. Kennedy became a touchstone in his life story.

Not only do visitors to the rallies get a chance to feel firsthand the breeze of history’s pages flipping by them, they get to convey their own message to the candidates.

Take Virginia Kessel, who drove 45 minutes to see Bush speak at the edge of an airfield in Springfield, Mo. She watched his speech, cheered and then moved up toward the stage, along with a crush of others who wanted to touch the Republican candidate. After one woman in the crowd practically tossed her child on stage, Kessel lithely split the crowd, reached up and shook the candidate’s hand.

Sure, history and celebrity were part of her motivation, but there was a better reason for the day’s trek.

“I want him to see me,” she said. “I want him to know I support him. He needs that from us. He needs to see our faces and meet us. That way he knows what he’s doing all this for.”