Legal Commentary

In particular, character arguments were central to George W. Bush's critique of Al Gore and John Kerry and, indeed, were about all there was to Bob Dole's 1996 campaign. This has tended to work well as a tactic because the press is a great venue for transmitting character attacks but a terrible venue for transmitting issue attacks because reporters mostly don't understand issues and even when they do they pretend not to.

My sense is that a political culture whose dominant medium is television inevitably emphasizes issues of character, empathy, trust and personal connection between the candidate and the public rather than emphasizing substantive discussions of policy. That is because television is far better at conveying techniques of character presentation and, conversely, character assassination than it is as a medium for serious discussion of public issues. It is good at telling stories, and portraying good and bad character and less good at conveying nuances of policy and explaining the long term consequences of policies that cannot easily be connected to individual persons and individual story lines. Political campaigns have always been about character since the founding of the republic (think of the attacks on character of the early federal period, which were carried on through newspapers); but a culture dominated by television amplifies this long standing feature of politics. Television takes an important feature of politics and makes it even more important.

Think of it this way: A small number of voters care enough about issues to learn about them, about the nuances of the various candidates' positions, and about which positions are likely to be most effective. However, most voters-- and, crucially, most undecided voters who rarely pay much attention to politics-- are more likely to conclude that the issues are quite complicated, what is likely to work is also difficult to determine, and therefore the rational strategy is to vote for the candidate whom they trust the most. Character and presentation of self become crucial for gaining such trust. Because many voters lack information about issues and must rely on trust, democratic politics has always concerned issues of character to some extent. The dominance of television, which conveys messages (and attacks) about personal character far more effectively than messages about policy questions, simply increases this tendency.

Because television makes both character presentation and attacks on character increasingly central and effective, both sides use them more and more, dominating other methods of campaigning. Politicians can no longer, as they did in the 19th century, remain largely aloof from the public; they must establish a personal connection to voters. To do this they must be prepared to open up every aspect of their lives to the public (or at least appear to) so that the public can know who they "really" are. But the politician who lives by character presentation also dies by character presentation. It is important to paint a good portrait of your character and establish a personal relationship with voters, but it is just as important to paint your opponent as having bad character and a lack of understanding, empathy, and personal connection to voters.

This effect well predates 1996. Think of Ronald Reagan's famous "morning in America" commercials in 1984, which were vacuous in terms of policy but powerful in terms of associating Reagan with positive characteristics of hope, patriotism and optimism. Although television helped focus much negative attention on Bill Clinton's character, it also allowed Clinton to connect with audiences, convey his empathy, and appear as a caring Chief Executive. And of course, George W. Bush succeeded in 2000 and 2004 not because of his apparent command of policy issues, but because of his ability to connect with sufficient numbers of voters and gain their trust, and to successfully portray his opponents as effete, insincere, dishonest, and out of touch with the public.

Will the Internet make any difference to these tendencies? One might argue that if television culture makes presentations of character central to contemporary politics, much of the Internet is still text based. But there are three responses: First, most people still get much of their impressions of candidates through television. Second, Internet discussions tend to glom onto and be driven by discussions occurring in the traditional mass media. Hence much Internet discussion-- and particularly the most partisan discussion-- also turns on character and perceptions of character. Indeed, in some respects it is a throwback to a much earlier period: partisan discussion on the Internet resembles the party newspapers of the early federal period, (in)famous for their unrelenting attacks on candidates' characters and personal lives. Third, assuming that the difference between video and text is quite important, the Internet is not solely a text based medium; it already features enormous amounts of political content in video form and the ratio of video to text is only likely to increase over time. In short, we cannot say that the Internet will change contemporary politics' increasing reliance on presentations of character. Some of the different media of the Internet-- for the Internet is many media, not one-- might ameliorate these effects of television culture, but others may exacerbate them.

Full post as published by Balkinization on February 03, 2008 (boomark / email).