Lights! Camera! . . . And Now What?

If a brick could talk on television, it would sound like George W. Bush. Yet that may be better for the U.S., when hearing from its president, than having in the White House another glib, facile, alluring anchorman biting his lower lip.

Our orator-elect was on TV Monday praising Martin Luther King Jr. in a short, clunky, unpersuasive speech read so haltingly that it appeared formed from clay and baked in a kiln. Its thud was deafening.

The point is not that Bush was or wasn’t speaking with genuine conviction about a civil rights icon held dear by the multitudes. Or that his agenda, a few days before his inauguration, may have been less heart-driven than political--to expand his tenuous mandate by winning over African Americans, who voted overwhelmingly for Al Gore on Nov. 7.

Bush would not have been the first politician with something up his sleeve.

The point is that when working the lens in a video age when presidents address the nation largely through TV, Bush is a long, loping Texas stride backward from the fluid communicator he’s succeeding.

In the eye of the camera, Clinton is the man, Bush the mannequin.

It’s for other reasons, not because of his camera skills, that Bush is being sworn in as 43rd president Saturday instead of Gore. What camera skills? Although likable enough on television when affecting his folksy mode, Bush is not even Clinton lite.

For which the nation may someday be thankful.

A president who is awkward and relatively transparent on camera is preferable to one willing to use his pizazz and TV mastery to potentially deceive the public, as Clinton did on some occasions, most famously when assuring viewers he “did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

Imagine Bush trying to pull that one off on camera if he were a philanderer.

Thickness in the extreme can be dangerous, of course. What the U.S. doesn’t need in the White House is a grunting Quasimodo unable to express himself at press conferences, address the U.S. resolutely at times of crisis or define clearly, in more formal settings, his policies and vision for the nation. Bush doesn’t appear to fit that lowly category. He’s merely bad on camera, and uninspiring, stumbling even when giving a good-ol’-boy farewell speech to Texas in Midland on Wednesday.

Although no golden orator in the classical sense, Clinton is much more effective than Bush, somehow appearing spontaneous even when reading a speech himself and not making eye contact.

Flashing back across Clinton’s presidency brings evidence that he has been truly spectacular as a TV communicator, arguably better even than the doyen of charm himself, Ronald Reagan, whose message to the masses was less what he said than it was his own physical presence. Forget the words. One sheepish grin and cock of the head, and the Gipper got you.

Clinton, on the other hand, remains fluent in the language of Lower Lip. He bit his so often, hoping to project careful thought and sincerity, that you half expected it to crack open. And how seamless he was, chamoising his Populist TV persona to a schmoozy gloss, during those people-oriented town hall debates that he deployed so expertly to help him at the ballot box in 1992 and 1996.

The White House charismas of Clinton and Reagan can’t be taught. Presidents either have them or they don’t. As if strategized, however, the style-driven video behaviors of these two presidents were also perfectly tailored to the age in which they rose to national power, coinciding with TV’s own celebration of form and process over content, especially in news.

Ideologies aside, how perfect they were for a video news that, decades after being born in vaudeville theaters as newsreels near the turn of the 20th century, continued to roll in the jugglers, acrobats, dancing girls and acrobatic dogs.

It’s a milieu that just about always has valued performers over informers, Clinton being among the best at this stagecraft.

He evoked his TV magic brilliantly to confound the knee-jerk gasbaggery of pundits falling over themselves to forecast his demise for staining his administration along with a certain blue dress. “His presidency is as dead--deader--than Woodrow Wilson was when he had a stroke,” deadpanned George Will on ABC when damaging revelations about Monica Lewinsky began trickling out.

Wrong.

Although drawing ridicule from late-night comics and others for his various capers, moreover, Clinton was able, through sheer force of personality, to swat away Leno and Letterman one-liners like King Kong pawing off attacking fighter planes high above New York City.

As his enemies are now aware, Clinton is a long-distance runner. Just when they appear to have him licked, he leaves them behind with a wicked kick.

Because common wisdom has been that only the most telegenic of candidates need apply for the nation’s top job, there’s something refreshing about that not being the case with Bush. His own White House will rise or fall on more than his performances on TV, of course. Unmagnetic Harry Truman’s presidency and the TV age were born almost together, after all, and he is given good marks by most historians.

As for that traveling man Clinton, CNN carried a bit of his own farewell address to the Arkansas Legislature on Wednesday, and here was looking at you, kid. He was as confident, relaxed, beaming and commanding as ever, proving that the camera still loves him, even if many Americans don’t.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.