(Host)
Presidential campaigns make great efforts to convince us that their
candidates are common folk, just like us. Commentator Willem Lange is a
retired remodeling contractor, writer and storyteller who thinks that
Presidents – like neurosurgeons, for example – ought to be just a cut
above that.
(Lange) In the Presidential campaign of 1828, Andrew
Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, slaveholder, and deadly
duelist, ran against John Quincy Adams, a New England patrician. The
Adams campaign portrayed Jackson as an uneducated country bumpkin and a
poor speller married to a dark-complexioned woman whose previous
marriage had ended in a somewhat murky divorce. She was reviled as a
"convicted adulteress" and a "black wench." The attacks had a deadly
effect; Jackson’s wife, Rachel, collapsed and died at only 61 while
shopping for her inaugural gown. But Jackson’s image as a man of the
people – one that Lincoln used thirty years later to captivate the
frontiersmen – won him the election by a tiny margin
Those were
the good old days of political campaigns. The good thing about them
was, the attacks were limited by rudimentary communications. Nowadays
they’d spread instantly to every corner of the republic by radio,
television, Facebook, and Twitter. But I’m not sure their effect would
be any greater than it was then. Because, as George Lakoff points out
in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, people don’t vote their
self-interest as readily as they vote their "frames" – their preexisting
biases about the way things ought to be and how well they relate to the
candidates. Political advertising, both positive and negative,
identifies a target population and attempts to capture it by speaking
pointedly to its frames.
One current theme, which began during
the recent Bush years, is called the "Beer-Buddy" scenario; to whit,
"Ralph Underhill’s the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with. He
relates to your concerns; he’s authentic, just like you. So vote for
him."
This helps to explain the intense public interest, in 2008,
in Joe the Plumber, used by the McCain campaign to illustrate the
plight of the common man – till it was discovered he wasn’t named Joe,
wasn’t a licensed plumber, and owed back taxes. So now he’s running for
Congress.
If you were looking for a neurosurgeon, an attorney, a
psychotherapist, or an investment adviser, would you want the best you
could get, or somebody whose primary qualification was that you could
sit down and have a beer with him? Joe Klein, in a recent issue of
Newsweek, writes, "The beer-buddy test…can be filed under the category
of ‘populist baloney,’ a metastasizing tendency in American politics.
Authenticity is rapidly becoming a euphemism for simple
ignorance….Elitists – people who have actually studied complicated
stuff and become experts at it – are phonies. Just ask Rush Limbaugh."
This
is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.
Afterward, I may have a beer – but not with a Presidential candidate.