Selling Sincerity

This is being written in the evening, on Friday, June 6, 2008, so the next words may have to be modified – it seems things have been settled, and now one of two people will be the next president, John McCain or Barack Obama.  

 

Okay, okay – should Hillary Clinton fake out everyone again, and, on Saturday, June 7, surprise everyone, and instead of conceding she lost the nomination and enthusiastically endorsing Obama, defiantly announce that she will be the next president by getting enough delegates to come to their senses and change their minds at the Democratic convention in August, all bets are off. If you write about current events you do take your chances. And it is possible that Bush will start that war with Iran, nuking their nuclear sites, and, to facilitate that going smoothly, take out their military – land, sea and air – and all command and control capability, along with any supporting infrastructure. Then, given the geopolitical blow-back and worldwide economic chaos that would follow, he could indefinitely postpone our elections and declare himself interim president for the duration of the crisis. You never know.

 

But one should deal with what seems to be so. One should deal with the unlikely only if the unlikely actually occurs – you could drive yourself crazy otherwise.

 

So those few of us who actually vote will face a choice in November – the charismatic young black senator, or the elderly white war hero, a senator for twenty years. It’s kind of classic – the contrast startling.

 

But then, of course, there is the issue of just how we vote. Most people don’t follow the details of policy positions, or really consider experience – whether one has it or, if one has it, what that experience has or has not taught – or knowledge or intelligence, or even judgment. Most people seem to decide who should lead us based on some sort of tribal identity. Is the candidate one of us and seem to share our values? All else is not insignificant – it’s just secondary. So our decision becomes a question of character, of sensing the true nature of the candidate, whatever that might mean. We like to get what we call “a feel for the person.” Does the idea of this person making monumental decisions as head of the most powerful nation the world has ever seen seem close to something like okay? Who knows what they will face? What they know and have done may not be relevant. We know that. We vote on something much like instinct, or our best hunch.

 

Of course politicians running for high office know this. If winning votes is anything like selling a product, they know better than to sell the steak – they sell the sizzle. You don’t argue policy and substance. You’re selling something like character, and you must appear to be authentic – the real thing. Yes, whether you actually are authentic is somewhat moot – see Bush versus Gore eight years ago, the son of a president and grandson of a famous New England senator, the product of Ivy League schools and privilege turned out to be the quiet and a simple Texas man of the earth, and the other a phony. It’s been said so many time so that no one knows who actually said it first, but it is still true – “Sincerity: if you can fake it, you’ve got it made.” La Rochefoucauld, in his Reflections, put it more elegantly – “Sincerity is an openness of heart; we find it in very few people; what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others.”

 

But that artfulness is all. And the day-to-day operations of any presidential campaign are ongoing exercises in that art.

 

And this we now get, as one would expect, discussions of that art. There’s Mark Halperin in Time with his list of what John McCain should not underestimate about Barack Obama – and the warnings are clear. McCain should not underestimate the “astonishing enthusiasm that Obama inspires in his supporters – and how much it contrasts with the respect, but not passion, McCain enjoys from his own backers.” And there’s Obama’s Major League infrastructure, compared to McCain’s Double-A efforts (one might say Bush League, but he’s not that organized, in the Rove manner). And there’s this:

 

The inherent difficulty/sensitivity of running against two figures at once. McCain will have to 1) explicitly criticize a sitting Republican president before Republican audiences and 2) prevent the historic event of electing the nation’s first African-American president that many in the country (and the media) desire.

 

Halperin does also mention “how little most Americans care about foreign policy (beyond the Iraq War) when the economy is in the tank.” McCain is the war guy. And that leads to this item:

 

The extent to which McCain’s lack of an economic message could make Obama (who also is challenged in adequately addressing the economy) seem like Bob Rubin, Bill Clinton, and Lou Dobbs all rolled into one.

 

There are other warnings:

 

How powerful debates might be when the allegedly inexperienced Obama of allegedly questionable judgment goes toe-to-toe with McCain, even on national security, and is therefore deemed of sufficient strength and stature to be president by many.

 

How valuable Obama makes voters feel (”we are the change we have been waiting for”) – while McCain’s campaign instructs and lectures voters.

 

And on it goes. But what stands out from the list is the tenth item:

 

That in modern America, perception is often reality and style often beats substance.

 

It is the sizzle, not the steak. In American Conservative, Daniel Larison makes this observation:

 

… in any contest between Obama and McCain, Obama is the substantive, policy-oriented candidate, while McCain is the one offering mostly pious bromides about victory, service and being American. If style often beats substance, Obama is in trouble because, as his supporters tirelessly remind us, Obama does have a substantive policy agenda (even if he doesn’t spend as much time talking about it and a lot of his boosters don’t care what it is) and McCain’s entire campaign has been even more driven by biography and character than Obama’s.

 

Maybe Obama should be warned. Larison adds detail:

 

Perhaps McCain underestimates this for some reason, but it seems to me that he is the one Republican candidate, aside from perhaps Mike Huckabee, who understands this better than anyone and has used it to his advantage many times already. McCain and his loyal backers are counting on the perception that McCain is the anti-Bush, the independent maverick truth-teller, will trump the reality that he represents a continuation of almost every policy of Mr. Bush’s administration, and they are being aided in this on a regular basis by gullible or sympathetic pundits and journalists who keep framing every McCain move as an instance of “McCain distancing himself from the Bush administration.”

 

McCain regularly won among anti-Bush voters in the GOP primaries, and this perception of independence from the conventional GOP line seems to be a reason for his continuing appeal to independents and his ability to outpoll his own party label by ten points or more. In the eyes of the media, McCain must necessarily be distancing himself from Bush, because they “know” that McCain is the Good Republican and Bush is the antithesis of this.

 

They are also counting on McCain’s ability to get by without having a clue about numerous areas of policy. They probably anticipate that he will once again be able to prevail by muttering boilerplate about opposing wasteful spending and the dreaded earmark with the odd gas tax holiday pander thrown in for good measure. It’s worked before, so why not on a larger scale with the general electorate?

 

That’s a thought. To many, McCain just feels right.

 

At the American Scene, Reihan Salam disagrees with this about the advice McCain gets from one of his campaign guys:

 

This parallels an observation made by a friend of mine recently – that Mark Salter strongly reinforces major McCain vulnerabilities: an overemphasis on personal loyalty, an indifference or even hostility towards social conservatives, a high-mindedness that is mostly procedural and substance-free, and a marked disinterest in domestic policy. Anyone who wants John McCain to win needs to encourage the campaign and the candidate to fight against these tendencies.

 

It seems McCain does not make the conservatives feel right about him. Some would like a bit of actual substance – of their choosing. But McCain may have it right.

 

Who knows what they make of John McCain’s first real ad of the general election – not the internet-only or local primary ads. That would be this – “Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.” This seems to be an anti-war spot, of all things – except the message is that, realistically, we must make war, as awful as it is. We just shouldn’t romanticize it.

 

Yes, this has nothing to do with Obama – McCain is modifying his sizzle. He doesn’t want anyone to think he’s a warmonger, in spite of his riff on the Beach Boys tune. You can trust him, really.

 

Over at Firedog Lake there’s this, pointing out that McCain is “dissing Bush big time” when he says that nobody should romanticize war. Or as Digby says – “After all, the guy who trash talked his way through 2002 through 2004 is the poster boy for childish, armchair warrior bravado.” And she links to this, Bush telling “the troops in the trenches he wishes he could be there with them, fighting for God and glory.” He did say this:

 

“I must say, I’m a little envious,” Bush said. “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.”

 

“It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks,” Bush said.

 

What is McCain up to?

 

Maybe it doesn’t matter. In Vanity Fair, in this column, James Wolcott examines the “Man Crush” to uncover why some journalists “still can’t quit McCain.” Wolcott says that the “press and McCain share a bond, a fraternal order forged during the endless bull sessions on the ‘Straight Talk Express’ bus in 2000, when the candidate and those covering him became buddy-roo, fellow vaudevillians.” So no one will question the current sizzle. McCain has the press covering his back.

 

But Wolcott thinks nothing good will come of it –

 

Even Karl Rove has begun sentimentalizing about McCain in print, which you know can’t be good. A Machiavellian with a Man Crush weaves a terrible web.

 

Well, if it’s all a sales job, McCain is the master of product placement. If the product is sincerity, he’s covered.

 

And maybe Hillary Clinton was never covered. No one knew what she was selling. Yeah, they knew the steak – the policies and what experience she brought to the table – but not the sizzle. Chuck Todd at MSNBC sees the problem:

 

One word: women.

 

Clinton should not have avoided being labeled “the woman candidate” for president.

 

Early on, probably with the advice of Mark Penn and perhaps her husband, Clinton seemed to shy away from trying to create a women’s movement. It was similar to the way Obama did his best not to be labeled “the black candidate.”

 

Instead, Clinton focused on her strengths, showcasing her preparation for a job the country has seen exclusively held by men.

 

In Obama’s case, it was probably smart to force voters to view him as someone above race. It was safe to assume that if he showed an ability to win over whites, blacks would eventually embrace him.

 

But it was an incorrect assumption, as it turns out, that women would embrace Clinton in a similar fashion.

 

Perhaps women would eventually gravitate (they did late, and they would have in the general), but the campaign was slow to embrace its own historical significance.

 

She didn’t get it. There was sizzle to sell:

 

But again, Hillary Clinton didn’t run as the woman candidate, she ran as the candidate for president who happened to be a woman.

 

This may have actually failed to attract women early – those who weren’t crazy about Bill’s antics and were therefore less inclined to support his wife.

 

Early on Hillary Clinton didn’t do what Al Gore eventually did so well late in 2000 – and that is make the case that she was her own candidate, separate from Bill’s legacy.

 

Gore made it clear he was his own man when he picked Joe Lieberman – the Senate’s leading morality critic of Bill Clinton – as his running mate.

 

It is always a challenge for a sitting vice president to try to replace his boss.

 

But Hillary never had this moment.

 

Instead the campaign believed “Clinton fatigue” was a media created myth and that Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House was nothing but an asset for voters.

 

So she embraced the idea of continuing the Clinton legacy rather than focusing on the historical significance of her campaign to women.

 

And she lost. By the time she got around to hinting at the historical significance of her campaign to women it was all over. Oh well.

 

But that’s only how it seems from out here in Hollywood. What do we know about sincerity? As Fred Allen once said – “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.”

 

And somehow one is also reminded of that line from Tolstoy, from Anna Karenina – “Teach French and un-teach sincerity.”