The Politics of Perception
TYLER, GUS
Countdown '88 THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION BY GUS TYLER Both George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis know that Presidents are elected not because of what they are but because of what the voters...
...To Dukakis, the role of performer will pose some difficulty, since as that astute political commentator Michael Kramer has noted, the Massachusetts Governor is "the quintessential Rational Man—a problem solver who deeply believes that the fundamental correctness of a position should carry the day without resort to selling" But whatever their persona] preferences, the candidates will have to mount the national stage, while recognizing that in Ronald Reagan they have a hard actor to follow...
...See "On the Economic Divide," NL, July 11...
...If the "discouraged" were counted as unemployed and if part-time employment were figured fractionally, the jobless rate of 6.2 per cent, as officially reported for 1987, would come to 15.8 per cent, according to a calculation by Ward Morehouse and David Dembo of the Council on International and Public Affairs...
...But there was its equivalent, an immigrant neighborhood in Boston...
...The media were not acting out of malice, but out of the necessity to grab viewers through the drama of conflict...
...He is not even in a position to say that he gained hands-on experience during the last eight years by participating in major moves...
...itis "liberal," acodeword that will be sounded often in the days ahead...
...The "labor force" is defined as individuals who are working or looking for work...
...In the former case, he will want to elect a new team...
...The Washington Post subheaded its story: "Vice President Implicitly Criticizes Reagan Record in NAACP Speech...
...Before he can present himself as a toughie, Bush has to overcome the pale profile inherent in the post of Vice President...
...The history of the last 40 years, however, does not bear out what Silk and others take for granted...
...a sleepy-eyed delegate's face, amid the Duke's declamation, became an unspoken sign of dissent...
...her speech was provincial...
...they see their problem as personal rather than political...
...When Harry S. Truman ranfor President in 1948 thejobless rate was 3.8 per cent, but he barely scraped through with less than half the popular vote...
...After a quickie analysis of Republican illogic, she announced, in an idiosyncratic idiom, "That hound dog won't hunt...
...Ann Richards, daughterof the Lone Star state, told the delegates that if they wanted to know what a real Texan sounded like, they should listen to her and not to Bush...
...Having given one mind (to win) to three heads, in the final convention photo opportunity he seemed tomakeonegiantoutof seven dwarfs...
...subsequently, incumbency has been an incubus...
...Almost as a peroration, she went on to tell of conversations with her granddaughter, Lily, as they rolled the ball back and forth on "the Baptist pallet...
...Bufparttime employment has grown at a much faster rate than full-time employment during the past two decades," report Sar Levitan and Elizabeth Conway of George Washington University's Center for Social Studies, "and now accounts for one of every five persons at work in the United States...
...The reason for this may be because the official measure of "unemployment" is less of an indicator of the nation's economic circumstance today than it was in prewar days...
...Dukakis, by contrast, is the child of Greek Orthodox immigrants, married to a Jew, and aproductofthe Kennedy complex...
...Here, Bush again suffers the disadvantage of being an incumbent Vice President...
...It is to Dukakis' advantage to persuade the voter that if he is under undue duress, facing a bleak future, it is due to faulty policies in Washington...
...Her references were parochial...
...Many have forgiven the President for his absent-mindedness and looked upon him as a dear old granddad whose faculties are failing, but they have become increasingly uneasy about passing the ball to fumbling hands...
...Dukakis put the finishing touches on the portrait in describing his origins...
...While voters look for a President who is smart as well as strong, they also— usually unwittingly—prefer someone of the right "stock...
...Such a "recount" would not have much meaning if the percentage of parttimers in the labor force remained about the same over theyears...
...Dukakis has the advantage of having been there as governor of Massachusetts at a fortunate moment in the life of that commonwealth: The jobless rate is way down...
...He cain't he'p it" (much hooting and laughter...
...He brought unity out of the trinity of Dukakis, "the Father," Bentsen, His begotten "Son," and Jesse Jackson, the "Holy Spirit...
...the economy is booming...
...Poor George," she intoned with mock pity...
...It is to Bush's advantage to create a climate in which the popular perception is that all is well with America, and that if all is not well with you, you're the problem...
...During the next eight years, Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson presided over a nation that saw unemployment drop to 3.6 per cent...
...The convention video on Dukakis did not stress the intellectual qualities of the man who, in his youth, was known to his classmates as "Chief Brain-in-the-Face," but often referred to his athletic prowess...
...Candidates, particularly Presidential candidates, are perceived as expressions of a culture or, better, a subculture—class, region, religion, national origin, even sex...
...Martin Van Buren did in 1836...
...Ronny and Gorby have embraced in public—to the political discomfort of both candidates...
...He was born with a silver foot in his mouth" (a roar from the sons of the soil...
...In his acceptance speech, Dukakis emitted enough sparks to suggest a fire in his belly...
...A few days later, Bush described himself as "the underdog...
...the budget has been in balance...
...Dukakis has lost a thrust, and Bush does not want to mention the matter too loudly for fear that he will lose conservative votes...
...In the last century and a half no incumbent Vice President seeking the Presidency has made it...
...We'll return to that question as the campaign develops...
...Four years later unemployment was down to 3 per cent, but the candidate of the party in power, Adlai E. Stevenson, lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...Act One, Scene One calls for each man to demonstrate that he is tough...
...in the latter, he will select a new shrink...
...Senate...
...Ann Richards might wryly comment, "But that underdog won't hunt...
...So between now and Election Day Bush must somehow turn himself into the Bar Mitzvah boy proclaiming, "Today I am a man...
...Immediately following the convention, Dukakis' lead in the polls rose from 10 to 17 points...
...People who may be in trouble economically somehow do not look to Washington...
...In this tug-of-war Bush has the upper hand, because he can "point with pride" to the publicly perceived achievements of the Reagan Administration...
...he cannot reply, "I was there...
...The father and mother who arrived with a few pennies and a fierce determination to succeed in a new land were a metaphor for wave upon wave of immigrants and migrants who crossed oceans, prairies and mountains to reach America...
...History has pointed up the many minuses of being the Number Two man...
...Jesse Jackson, he declared, "deserves a salute from us," andhepromisedto" stand for a new harmony among races...
...Here Bush has an advantage...
...Bentsen, another Texan, skillfully picked up the brush...
...He made a feeble attempt to disassociate himself from Reagan at the recent NAACP convention...
...To Bush, concocting acts and uttering words that create public perceptions will come naturally, since that is what he has been doing most of his life...
...Equally important is the voter's perception of his personal circumstances...
...There was no log cabin, of course...
...The jobless rate for married men," he writes, "is 3.1 per cent and for married women 3.7 per cent...
...Another significant factor is the decline in real wages (adjusted for prices), caused by a shift from factory jobs to poorer paying service jobs...
...He is the right stock...
...No matter how qualified, no Catholic could be nominated as President of the United States until 1928, and no Catholic was elected to the Oval Office until 1960...
...The rate continued to rise and stood at 6.7 per cent when JFK took office in 1961...
...He is Protestant...
...Dukakis cannot say, as Walter F. Mondale did in 1984, that the President has not spoken with the Kremlin to explore pathways to coexistence...
...To many he is the stereotypic Eastern Democrat, an uprooted upstart trying to reach the top by hobnobbing with the nouveau Irish and joining with intruders of dark complexion to tax hardworking Americans in order to hand out goodies to strangers...
...But more to the point here, income polarization is not popularly perceived to be a major campaign issue...
...Those who have given up seeking jobs in the previous four weeks—literally millions of people—are not included...
...In addition, some 15 million new jobs have been created since 1981...
...His public choice of Lloyd Bentsen for Vice President, without prior notice to Jackson, has been interpreted as a notso-subtle signal to the nation that he, Dukakis, is in charge and under no obligation to "clear it with" Jesse...
...When he updated John F. Kennedy, to speak of the " next frontier," he was evoking the spirit of all the "frontiers" from Andrew Jackson to Jesse Jackson...
...By 1956 the jobless rate had gone up to 4.1 per cent, but Ike was reelected with a larger margin than the first time...
...Besides toughness, however, the nation is ready for a can-do person...
...Nor does the count distinguish between part-time and full-time employees, so that a person putting in only one hour a week is considered "employed...
...And Dukakis did it right before the public eye...
...Hardline Republicans have a name for this mongrel...
...Bush and Dukakis need to be perceived as able as well as willing...
...The Republicans will have their innings, too, as GOP campaign strategists try, from now to November, to demonstrate that their candidate is mucho macho...
...He has lived in enough states to claim he is a New Englander, a Midwesterner, a Southwesterner...
...Dukakis' story was that of the latest "Pilgrims" to the present Plymouth, and the Daniel Boones of the barrios, and the Johnny Appleseeds of the inner cities...
...The people want no wimp in the White House...
...He pointed to his 94-year-old father...
...Although he did not mention Bush once, he was defining and defying his rival contrapuntally...
...Yet neither, in fact, will perceptions of the candidate alone...
...Ann Richards was addressing the still smoldering populism of Dixie...
...Even the once hot issue of "peace" has, for the moment, been cooled...
...they want a strong man, especially at this moment when many feel that America " ain't what it used to be...
...Can this sort of election produce a President who senses the dangerous days ahead, and who has a mandate to act in a coming crisis...
...Jesse Jackson, the quintessential performer, who said that he wanted to be the Number Two man, has been upstaging the Number One man...
...The Dukakis strategy—if it is indeed a thought-out strategy—has been to convert Bush's plus to a minus and his own minus to a plus by reconstructing and perfecting the "log cabin" caper: Make your opponent out to be one of those spoiled elite, born with a "silver foot in his mouth," and make yourself out to be a self-made child of the frontier...
...The chances of a Jew, a black or a woman winning the nomination and the election remain minuscule today, more than 200 years after our official recognition of human equality...
...His ancestors came to this land early...
...His credentials conform...
...Does a voter who is in the dumps, for example, attribute his condition to the country being in a depression or to his personally being in a state of depression...
...he spoke of those freezing days in South Dakota when the family took refuge in a sod hut...
...Dukakis has a similar problem, albeit upside down...
...A Veep is seen as daddy's good little boy, a part he must learn well if he wishes to get along with the President, or to be renamed Vice President, or to get White House endorsement should he run...
...Countdown '88 THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION BY GUS TYLER Both George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis know that Presidents are elected not because of what they are but because of what the voters perceive them to be...
...Ironically, in these feats Dukakis was assisted by the media, who were eager to depict the Atlanta proceedings as yet another episode in a soap opera where Democrats are recurrently disabled by a chronic intestinal virus...
...Thus the historic evidence suggests that the jobless rate is not the sole, perhaps not even the primary, factor in determining the electoral outcome...
...With "peace" and "prosperity" not perceived as issues, the current contest necessarily revolves around the candidates' qualifications a national leaders...
...The savvy Leonard Silk of the New York Times goes further...
...The implication was that it would take more than an ordinary mortal to bring order out of this chaos...
...Dukakis has had to make several moves to recapture the spotlight...
...her appeal was synecdochic, using the part, the earthy folk of the southland, as a symbol of the whole, the common men and women everywhere, with their traditional disdain for the dainty dandies in whose palace there is no "pallet...
...Nevertheless, in 1968 Republican Richard M. Nixon beat an incumbent Vice President, Hubert H. Humphrey...
...The broad outlines of the picture were drawn by the Democratic keynote speaker...
...The slightest difference among the delegates was seized upon as a portent of disorder: A lone placard of some stray dissident became the focus of the camera...
...Under Jimmy Carter the jobless rate fell from 7.6 to 7.1 between 1976-80, yet he lost to Ronald Reagan...
...Hedidn't have to speak of Bush beyond recalling that in the struggle between the patrician and the pleb, between George and himself, the man of the people won the race for the U.S...
...From this he concludes that Bush in a winning position: "When voters have been looking at a strongly expanding economy they have usually gone with the party in power...
...These trends—part-time work, lower real earnings, dropouts from the labor force—explain why average family income for nine-tenths of the nation has been falling while 15 million more jobs have been added to the economy since 1981...
...There has been no recession since 1983, and the official rate of unemployment has fallen from 9.7 (1983) to 5.4 per cent (July 1988...
...For convention watchers, moreover, there was an opportunity to see Dukakis in operation...
...The consequence is that a family with three earners —father, mother and child—may well be earning less now than when dad, the auto worker, was the sole earner several years ago, because dad is now peddling souvlaki and mother and daughter are in low paying part-time jobs...
...His pointing with pride to his roots, including Marathon and Aristotle, served as a reminder that he came from a "stock" that was strong in body and strong in mind...
...The statistics stand behind Bush...
...Dukakis' self-designation as "the quarterback" at the convention was not only a way of positioning himself as Numero Uno but also of portraying himself as a player in a tough sport...
...The debate is about individuals...
...Any claim that he was "in" exposes him to liability for Irangate, Noriegate, Pentagate, Meesegate, and all the other "gates" that may open up between now and November 8. When Democrats cry, "Where was George...
...Whether Michael is some archangel responsible for the "Massachusetts Miracle" or not, he is widely perceived to be the man behind the happy state of his state...
...Officially, the unemployment rate is the percentage of persons in the labor force who are not employed...
...Over the last three years, the impression has been that the man occupying the White House does not know what is going on in the basement of his own dwelling...
...Gus Tyler, a frequent contributor, is Assistant President of the ilgwu...
Vol. 71 • August 1988 • No. 14
