It’s not that there aren’t plenty of well-meant and well-executed articles and TV programs about the candidates and their stands on the issues-there are. And it’s not that these candidates really are the one-dimensional figures we come to see them as-they aren’t. The problem begins with our weakened political-party system, especially as it concerns the Democrats; it does not grow obvious presidential candidates. It just kind of springs candidates on the electorate–candidates who need introduction and definition every four years. The oddity of this is compounded by the techniques of modern blitz-campaigning which seem to be founded on the premise that even a known candidate who has been around forever can be changed repeatedly and instantaneously in the perceptions of the voters until his PR people and other handlers get it right. As a result, it’s not just the relatively unknown Democrats but also Republicans who may have been around since the year One who are forever being reconfigured for us.
What is at work here is a lethal lack of seriousness that makes it all the harder for us to deal with a final problem which is the big one: given the assault on our sensibilities and the seductiveness of the campaign-as-soap-opera presentation, we are increasingly at a loss ourselves to know how to judge these handler- and media-created caricatures. How do you judge them? It’s not so simple as merely picking the one closest to your own political values, since there will be a number of them claiming to think and want what you do and since there is so much accommodation to continuous polling results. So other standards must be invoked. What should these be? I am working on my own list.
By this I don’t mean some kind of rigidity that keeps a public figure fixed in his positions from political birth. In fact, a lot of cheap criticism for “flip-flopping” is leveled at candidates who had the wit to change positions under new circumstances or to bend some to get a program passed or even to admit to having been wrong. I think public officials who can’t admit to having been wrong are in fact the most dangerous of the breed, and flip-flopping charges are often out of context and unfair. What I mean by consistency is a candidate who does not do weekly image-trims and vocabulary replacements, who is not cynically manipulative of his supposed audience and ready to transform himself on a moment’s notice. Since speechwriters and other gurus these days are so unbecomingly eager to brag about their contribution to the candidate’s daily speech and action, it is generally pretty easy to know which are the worst offenders here.
No one who changes his views to meet every new political contingency can, by definition, make things happen (he will join up with things already happening and never fight a tough position through to success). So ability to make things happen includes seriousness and sincerity about the things the candidate espouses. All the folks who come to us asking for votes can produce elegant position papers. You need to look at their records in whatever public or private office to see how good they are as negotiators, prodders who can get others to actually act, who can exude personal authority in a non-authoritarian system and use it convincingly. Sooner or later all high officeholders remark that getting anything to happen is their hardest task.
Toughness is thus included in this category, along with a capacity to deal with adversity and to assert a commanding presence. One index here is the relationship of the candidate to those handlers: who is in charge of whom? Subtlety, perceptiveness and conviction are also among the attributes required to make things happen in politics. Look at these contenders’ records from that vantage point: what did they ever make happen?
Campaigns severely test this attribute. President Bush talks about opponents in campaigns as if he lacks it. He tends to belittle opponents and expresses sneering contempt for them, as if they weren’t quite entitled to oppose him. He does this even on subjects that he himself has famously failed to notice until others made issues of them; he then belatedly announces some kind of program of his own and denounces the others for daring to dabble in so serious a matter. Being able to disagree strongly and yet civilly is a great virtue in a political leader. And so is a capacity to sustain criticism without either turning nasty or turning tail. Nobody, surely, has yet been born into the human race who enjoys:-being criticized; and for many, even being argued with or contradicted is regarded as a life-threatening event. But taking it is different from liking it, and we have gotten into our fair share of trouble over the years because of politicians who could not tolerate (and actually profit from) dissent.
These are the criteria I try to apply to the characters in this year’s election prime-time soap. It is not easy when they have, already at this early date in the campaign, taken on the aspects of stock figures in a cast-the frowning troublemaker willing to destroy the company, the not quite effective younger brother, the renegade ideological cousin, the worthy but disinherited stepbrother and Miss Ellie and Sue Ellen and Kristin and the rest. But it has to be done. The other way lies the usual madness.
