Celebrity Politics

When George W. Bush and Al Gore left their conventions two months ago, they had laid out the basic narrative lines for the election to come, what Hollywood calls a “treatment.” Bush, taking a page from Bill Clinton, described himself as a different kind of Republican from the attack dogs who had hounded the president: compassionate instead of cruel, inclusive instead of intolerant, bipartisan instead of belligerent. Gore, taking a page from the William Jennings Bryan playbook, presented himself as a traditional Democratic populist fighting the rich and powerful to protect the average Joe. It was a pretty good scenario, contrasting philosophies and clarifying differences, and it promised a salutary debate predicated, as it was, on the idea that this is essentially a good and decent nation divided by means, not ends.

But that is hardly how the campaign has been playing out. As the debates amply demonstrated, instead of a serious and sustained engagement of issues, campaign 2000, like other recent presidential campaigns, has largely turned into a contest of ephemera and superficialities. Does Bush know the name of the new leader of Yugoslavia, much less how to pronounce it? Does he act sufficiently presidential, which amounts to standing straight and not throwing spitballs during debates? As for Gore, did he know he was telling a whopper when he claimed that his mother-in-law spent more for a prescription drug than he paid to get the same drug for his dog, or when he related the story of a Florida girl who had to stand in science class because her school lacked the resources to provide her a desk? These are the kinds of questions that have dominated political discourse for the last few weeks, and these are the questions on which the election is now likely to turn.

How did a presidential campaign again get sidetracked from a genuine policy debate to a game of gotcha? The answer lies in the nature of campaign coverage, which has changed radically over the last 25 years and which has changed the nature of the campaigns themselves. The media don’t want policy debates. They don’t want the dull recitation of positions and statistics that they know are likely to put readers and viewers to sleep. They understand that long election campaigns like ours quickly become tiresome if you don’t provide some human interest. Rather than passively report the candidates’ electoral narrative, they have chosen to create an electoral narrative of their own--one that has action, dynamism, drama for the audience, and one that empowers the media as traditional coverage never did. This campaign has become the product of that narrative.

The idea of the media writing an election narrative certainly isn’t new, but the shape the narrative now takes is. In the early days of the republic and for nearly a century thereafter, newspapers functioned as arms of political parties. They promoted their own candidates and pummeled the opposition, and the narrative they fashioned was a Manichean battle between good and evil. By the end of the 19th century, the press had become less partisan and more professional, increasingly viewing its role as a custodian of the public trust. In the period before radio and television, when voters seldom saw or heard their candidates, the press related campaign events and laid out positions with at least a pretense of objectivity. The narrative here was the clash of policy and the ebb and flow of the campaign.

Whether it was rabidly partisan or neutral, though, the press let the candidates and parties set the agenda and frame the debate. The arrival of television and of the televised debates, which enabled candidates to reach the electorate directly, forced the media to redefine their coverage. What has emerged is something that looks suspiciously like celebrity reporting. Candidates’ personalities are analyzed and their life histories exhumed as if they were movie stars. Again like stars, they are judged by whether they exceed or disappoint the expectations that the media have created for them, and their campaigns are dissected and then rated by how effectively they manipulated the media--the very people covering the campaign.

But the most important redefinition of coverage has been the substitution of the media’s own narrative for the candidates’ and parties’ narratives. By now, everyone is familiar with the story line, which fits every presidential campaign with only slight modifications and which virtually everyone in the major media seems to sign onto. According to this formula, one campaign is always foundering, while the other is righting itself. We’re told in exactly the same language, from one election to the next, that the foundering campaign hasn’t found its message or it can’t rally its troops or it is in organizational disarray. Thus Gore’s campaign was rudderless and drifting in July, Bush’s rudderless and drifting in September.

More important than the characterization of the campaigns, however, is the characterization of the candidates. Every campaign season now begins with the media establishing a basic and clearly recognizable character flaw for each contender. These flaws will then be endlessly sounded and vigilantly examined throughout the battle until the issues have been all but obliterated and the election turned into a referendum not on which candidate will better serve the nation but on which candidate’s flaws are the more egregious. In effect, every election now is a battle of media metaphors.

In the present campaign, the media established early that Bush was a genial ignoramus--a “frat boy,” as the press has dubbed him. Gore was a supercilious exaggerator--a “truth stretcher,” as the press has dubbed him. Once these images were created--and, again, virtually everyone in the press happily signed on--they became the scrim through which everything was to be viewed and the basis on which every judgment was to be rendered. Bush is always one mispronunciation or grammatical error away from confirming his mental deficiency; Gore always one misstated statistic or inflated claim from confirming his mendacity. Their only consolation may be that in order to maintain narrative momentum, the media hammer at the flaws serially. Three weeks ago, it was Bush’s turn to get bashed. The last two weeks it has been Gore’s. Where the wheel stops on election week may very well determine the outcome.

But this narrative of the idiot versus the liar not only defines the campaign coverage. Because the candidates fully understand that this is the media’s obsession, and because the media, through repetition, largely govern how the rest of us think and feel about the candidates, the narrative actually drives the entire electoral process now. The candidates cannot appeal to the people without media exegesis; they must appeal to the pundits, who will interpret them for the people. As a result, Bush’s whole strategy is to prove to the press he is not a fool, Gore’s to prove he is not Baron Munchausen, so that the media will then tell the rest of us. More, the candidates begin to use the same rhetoric to label their opponent, because they know how effective the press has made it.

This is the only context in which one can fully understand the debates. In Debate 1, Bush had to demonstrate to the press that he could expatiate on foreign policy, so he had his handlers crib him, and the media approvingly reported that he sounded presidential. Gore, the media decided, had to seem warm and credible, for which they gave him fewer points, telling us that he was debating issues when he should, in their view, have been cultivating image. In Debate 2, Bush had turned into the anti-Bush, talking policy details because he knew that is how the media would continue to judge him, while Gore became the anti-Gore, so eager to have the media label him amiable and so lacking in aggressiveness that he was practically somnambulant. By Debate 3, Bush had only to stand in the same room as Gore to get the media’s stamp of presidentiality, while Gore yet again had to respond to the media criticisms that he had been too soft by returning to his more aggressive style of Debate 1. In any case, the substance of the discussion was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered in the pundit postmortems was whether the candidates had underscored or neutralized the characterizations that the pundits themselves had created.

If this makes the public sound passive, they are, but not because the media have hoodwinked them. The media get away with scripting the campaign and defining the dramatis personae because they know that, for all the lip service about issues and specifics, this is what a public raised in the din of an entertainment culture really wants: a good show with characters who keep exposing their weaknesses just like the characters on conventional soap operas. By presenting the election as a clash of personal qualities rather than policy and philosophy, the media both humanize the process and trivialize it, making it just one more celebrity narrative among the dozens of narratives of marital infidelity, substance abuse, financial disaster and illness that fill the pages of People and the supermarket tabloids.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the dean of the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the most astute analysts of election coverage, suggested that everyone just turn off their televisions after the debates so that the media couldn’t impose its narrative on us. But so few people were watching the debates to begin with--roughly 35 million Americans for the last two--that the entire nation was like a film audience that had only read the reviews of a movie without seeing it, meaning that the reviews ultimately usurped the film itself. In U.S. elections, the media spin always usurps the campaign. But you can’t just turn it off, even if you wanted to. It is everywhere and it is overwhelming, and it will almost certainly determine who the next president will be--the lamebrain or the liar. *