When it comes to politics, maybe Bill O'Reilly is your guy. Maybe you tilt entirely the other way, to Keith Olbermann. Or somewhere in between, where there are hundreds of other people, mostly New York and Washington-based, who make a good portion of their livelihood as pundits. They listen primarily to each other, and just a few months ago were assessing exactly how the inevitable Giuliani-Clinton campaign would play out.
I'll tell you who my guy is--Aristotle. Sure, he hasn't shown up on Fox News for several thousand years now, but he's still exponentially more perceptive than the rest of the punditocracy combined. In fact, he's already figured out who the winner of this election will be...even if he's got no way to communicate it to us.
Aristotle is the father of modern rhetoric, and politically speaking, there is one aspect of his thinking that is determinative in this election, just as it has been in the last several--authenticity. He didn't use that specific term, but it's the modern name for the final of the three legs on which his definition of rhetoric is based.
The first is logos, or logic. In political terms, it's where the candidates stand on the issues. These can be statistically based, like health care, or primarily emotional in nature, like abortion. But they call all be defined to some degree as 'for it' or 'against it'. These are of overriding importance to voters in either party--but they haven't mattered in months, since the people judging on the basis of logos made their decisions a long time ago.
The second aspect is pathos, or, in our vernacular, emotional appeal. This isn't a simple matter of whose words seem to soar, who pounds the podium hardest, or who can align himself closest to Joe the Plumber. In this election in particular, there is a pronounced and potentially attractive emotional narrative attached to each candidate. When your choice is between the imprisoned war hero, the black-man-raised-by-a-single-white-mother, the guy who instantly lost a wife and daughter in a car crash, or the small-town-girl-made-good, mother-of-a-special-needs-child, it's likely you're going to find something there to respond to. And on this score, too, many have already made up their minds.
But for those last stragglers who have yet to make up their mind--those six or seven percent who for some reason can't seem to pick on the basis of logos or pathos--votes will be decided on ethos. This is the realm of authenticity. Not where the candidates stand...or what they represent...but on an intuitive, deeply visceral level, the conclusions we draw about them on a human level--who are these people? Look at the way he stands...does she make eye contact with her opponent?...one walks across the stage while the other speaks...another smiles coldly in the face of his opponent's barbs. Each of these largely subconscious cues makes a difference--and not just for the late deciders. In this election, ethos has also changed the minds of many who had initially settled on the basis of logos or pathos.
There is little doubt among the pundit class that George W. Bush won the vast majority of his votes in 2000 because he was judged 'the guy I'd most like to have a beer with'--as if the consumption of a lager were the best means to choose the most powerful person in the world. The Supreme Court may have finally decided that election, but passing the authenticity test was Bush's hall pass to that chamber.
This time, the challenge of logos for each candidate was clear from the start. McCain needed to convince that his positions were different from Bush's. Obama was required to demonstrate that his own weren't that far from Bush so as to seem radical.
Emotional narratives were almost as transparent. McCain: 'the Hanoi Hilton made me my own man'. Obama: 'I'm living proof that in this country, any person can become President'. Interestingly, not only has neither candidate challenged these fundamental assertions, but have, on occasion, voluntarily spoken them on behalf of their opponents.
It is on the level of authenticity--what is, and more importantly, what can be made to seem either real or unreal--where this election will be decided. There are a handful of inflection points where ethos decided the result--even if we don't know yet what that result will be.
Walking off the stage in Minneapolis (even though it had yet to be validated with poll data) the McCain-Palin team had wowed the American crowd. They turned around the seemingly insurmountable momentum aroused by Obama in Denver (oops--the pundits proved wrong again). It is hard to argue that at that moment, the then-larger legions of undecideds were falling in love with Sarah Palin, and what she seemed to represent. I'll see your 'black man can be president', and raise you one 'hockey Mom can be vice president'. You can take your Ivy League pedigree and stuff it--after all, isn't that what got us Gore and Bush and Kerry in the first place? What good were any of them? Give me a down home girl every time. America could feel who she was.
Let's call the combined debates the second inflection point. While there would be analysts to pick apart small aspects of Obama's stated policies and positions, I have yet to find one who said, "on the basis of what he showed tonight, he does not have the temperament to be commander in chief." Quite the contrary. Despite his military credentials and decades in the Senate, it was McCain who made most of us uncomfortable. He would not look his opponent in the eye--thus, not as brave as we thought? He pointed and referred to Obama as 'that one'--a willingness to diminish and disregard those with whom he disagreed? And his irrational 'suspending' of his campaign on the eve of the first debate...in order to run to Washington to add nothing to the bailout debate...gave credence to charges that this man was erratic, particularly in the face of a crisis.
In the meantime, Katie Couric exposed Sarah Palin for her provincialism. But the coup de grace for many supporters was the news that this 'small town girl' had been clothed in $150,000 of duds from the least small-town retailers wallowing on the evil coasts. Undoubtedly a good share of the 60% of voters who at this writing declare her unfit for D.C. rendered their verdict on the basis of failed authenticity.
On the other side, the first and most benign charge against Obama from his critics was that they didn't 'really know who he is'. Once the Democratic convention ended, they found out. He's a consistent, serious, and pretty boring guy. Among the four candidates on the national ticket, he indisputably made the least news during the last two months of the campaign. While Sarah was riffing and the Maverick was sputtering and Biden ostensibly gaffing, Barack sat there like Jabba the Hutt, impassively repeating his lines. He certainly didn't seem to define himself as 'the One', as an adoring Oprah had. He wasn't windsurfing on his rare day off...he was taking his daughter trick-or-treating. When he got angry about how the Wall Street meltdown was affecting real people, not the investment bankers, well, he actually seemed to mean it.
Across the land, you could hear Reagan Democrats muttering, 'well, he sort of does seem presidential'.
So how then could it be that Obama could fail the authenticity test? Well, it would be due to the ability of the Karl Rove acolytes to again negatively define their opponent's character. Obama 'won't talk to you about the extent of his association with that radical, Bill Ayers'. Well, actually he had. 'He won't admit that his economic plan is going to raise your taxes'. Well, actually it wouldn't. 'He's a socialist..a redistributor.' Well, only in the sense that all Presidents are, including that good Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, under whom the top personal income tax rate was 91%! It is not by accident that almost a quarter of voters in Texas still believe that Obama is a Muslim...and that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are still hidden in the back of closet somewhere in Baghdad...and that the Easter Bunny will rise again.
If the political affiliations and advisers of each candidate were reversed, I am convinced that by now we would have been bombarded with details on how the 'war hero' McCain had broken under captivity, and made 30-some propaganda tapes in support of his captors. It would not matter whether this was true. The fact that some people believe it to be true would more than suffice for the Rovians.
What is clear here in the closing hours is that authenticity matters. In fact, maybe in political America it matters more than anything else. And it is demonstrated most when, through the magic of television, and the exercise of the last remnants of honest journalism, we can figuratively look the candidates in the eye...unfiltered by a fog of punditry, and the prism of political attack...and make our own judgements--who is this person?
Aristotle knows.
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