The Wake

The biggest key to winning an election is projecting a public image. It surpasses where candidates stand on the issues, how they work with others, what their personalities are like, and just about every other necessary factor needed to run a successful campaign. Remember when then-Minnesota Attorney General and 2006 DFL gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch called a reporter a “Republican whore” one week before the election? Hatch’s loss to Gov. Pawlenty shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise to in retrospect. The sad thing is, Hatch made best election performance by a DFL gubernatorial candidate in decades, according to St. Olaf College political scientist Dan Hofrenning. Remember that this was 2006, when the Democrats swept the national elections.

To be fair, it’s quite an assumption to single out this one event as costing Hatch the election, but let’s not forget this was a man notoriously known for his bad temper. His bad temper was his public image, and he lost because of it. A similar argument can be made for why Sen. John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in a year when the Democrats should’ve won the Presidency by a landslide. Kerry’s public image was simply too dull to win an election of such magnitude. Now the Democrats are blessed to have Barack Obama, a man whose skills at speaking well and looking good has placed him in the lead of delegate support. If he were a white man, I bet he would’ve already locked the nomination up by now.

A lot of my friends are attracted to Obama because of his superb speaking skills. My roommate told me one of the reasons he likes Obama is because “we need a President who’s a good speaker.” The fact is we’ve had plenty of lousy Presidents with gifted speaking abilities. Bill Clinton’s public figure was as sharp as a fox and as delicious as rhubarb pie, but as President his greatest accomplishments were enacting NAFTA and limiting public welfare. And let’s not forget that he passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which lead to increased monopolistic ownership of the media (which Constitutionally belongs to us, the people). But he could give one hell of a speech.

As long as we’re on the topic of good public speakers, Ronald Reagan cannot be ignored. Is it an irony that Reagan, who to many is one of the worst U.S. Presidents in recent memory, was known at the time of his tenure as the Great Communicator? No one can deny Reagan’s awesome ability to hold an audience in his hands. Check out this video and see if you can’t stop yourself from smiling at how cute he is:

What a jokester.

I remember when one of my former political science professors, an old fashioned gun-lovin’ bureaucracy-hatin’ libertarian known as Sam Stanton, cynically blamed the televised 1960 Kennedy/Nixon Presidential debate for shifting the political conversation from “What’s his stances?” to “What’s he wearing?” I don’t know if that instance was the beginning of the public’s image-over-substance mentality, but I’ll bet Stanton was on to something.

I’m not going to argue that crafty speaking skills and a likable public image aren’t essential qualities in a politician, but when image clouds policies, it’s more than an issue. It’s a democratic problem.