Authenticity

Popeye

Walk the talk. Talk the walk.

To be believable the biography and behavior of candidates need to reflect their words and policy. 

UP CLOSE, September 2015: I was at the Democratic state convention in Manchester New Hampshire. It was the opening joint appearance showcase for candidates. I watched Hillary Clinton try to tell a log cabin story. Her mother, she said, faced the need to go to work at age 16. Hillary said that this experience infused her with passion and desire to bring opportunity to everyone.

It seemed phony to me. 

Hillary was a suburban upper middle class girl who went to Wellesley and excelled, then to Yale Law, then married a future president and got rich--really rich--being a leader in government, then writing books and giving speeches for money. She has an honest story to tell, a story of gratitude and privilege, and what she learned from that experience.

Ideally she could have said how those book advances and $400,000 speeches to Goldman, Sachs were possible because of her fame as a public official, not her own personal talents, which is why every penny was donated to charity. That would have buttressed a progressive policy plank. 

But this isn't what happened with the speech money. She kept it and got even richer. It was legal. She had a right. But she created that biography and was stuck with it.

Hillary, telling her mother's story.

The story of her life did not coincide with the story she wanted to convey. Therefore,  she borrowed her mother's story of struggle and poverty. The mis-match left her open to being called "Crooked Hillary." The name stuck.

A presidential candidate cannot fake it, not even Trump. Trump portrays himself consistently as a narcissistic con man and bully--a big talker who grabs what he can--money and vaginas and fame--without apology. People understand they aren't getting pious Jimmy Carter, and he is proud of that. 

Trump proved something. You don't have to be good to be elected to office. You do have to be who you are, without apology. Enough people want authenticity more than virtue to be elected president.

People don't listen. They watch. 

Herb Rothschild is a retired professor, and current peace advocate, living in Ashland, Oregon. His guest post takes a look at biography and behavior. He says we make inferences about how people would behave in office from what we see them do.

Herb Rothschild: Guest Post

Rothschild, photo by Allen Hallmark

"This short piece is a reflection about the role of policy positions in elections. I’ll begin by saying that my political focus has always been on issues that I deeply care about—economic justice, civil liberties, nuclear disarmament, etc. And my experience in the Civil Rights Movement, the Nuclear Freeze Movement and others has convinced me that meaningful change originates in grassroots activism. But, ultimately, large-scale policy changes must be adopted and then implemented by elected officials, so involvement in electoral politics is critical. 

This blog has convinced me that, at least in Presidential elections, a candidate’s self-presentation is now more determinative of success than his/her policy positions. But I don’t think the two are utterly separate. I certainly hope not, because then electoral campaigns would be nothing more than public relations campaigns.

To be convincing, a candidate’s self-presentation must have some relationship to political substance. For example, I don’t think either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton could have convinced people that they would champion U.S. workers damaged by current global economic arrangements. The Bushes and the Clintons were too thoroughly identified with anti-labor trade pacts like NAFTA, and they were known to be tight with the very wealthy. Neither of them talked about re-doing existing pacts or scuttling the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership. And both were known to be getting big donations from big donors. 

Sanders could sell himself as a populist because he not only looked and talked like one, but also his record didn’t leave him vulnerable to exposure as a hypocrite. And I think Trump got away with posing as a populist because he had no track record in government to embarrass him, and because he and Wall Street openly scorned each other. And both convinced us that big donors wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.

In addition, both Sanders and Trump did enunciate policy positions to reinforce their self-presentations and rhetoric. Sanders’ were more specific than Trump’s—Medicare for Everyone, $15 minimum wage, free college tuition. But at least Trump sounded like he had some positions, especially on trade and coal mining, and in his inept and destructive he has tried to enact them. 

So my conclusion is this: it’s not all about image projection. The image being projected cannot be obviously incongruent with a substantive track record (if there is one) and the promises on the campaign trail. Frankly, I think that Sanders and Hillary would have performed in office just the way we could infer from what we saw of them, and Trump certainly has."