Between Personality and the Polls

...I think they do it for many reasons...

...That appears TO BE something Kerry needs to remember...

...He thought that if his position was right, the public would follow...

...A Michael Dukakis strategy of passive resistance in the face of withering incoming fire—however gentlemanly—will gain him neither plaudits nor votes, much as we might wish otherwise...

...Luck also matters...

...Beyond storylines, technique matters...

...They are a peculiar mixture of things— from money to issues to candidate performances in televised debates...

...My Life...

...Ronald Reagan knew from instinct and training that good lines well delivered beat authenticity every time...

...Or should the President alone behave this way...

...At bottom, Cornog says, the power of the personal story is an "important part of the nation's strength...

...it focused on Kennedy's heroics as he rescued his crew...

...Worse, he violated a fundamental rule of vaudeville: Always dance your heart out, but never let them see you sweat...

...It is hard to envision that kind of behavior in the political world Newport imagines...

...Similarly, the story that endured about John Kennedy did not emphasize the embarrassing fact that his maneuverable PT boat was run over by a hulking Japanese destroyer...

...Ego might in part explain their resistance to a more direct democracy, but Presidents are constantly trying to smooth over conflicting internal party pressures and making compromises...

...Thus the contest will pit Kerry, the elite Eastern liberal who can't make up his mind about the time of day, against Bush, the determined Texas conservative who knows what he thinks and clings valiantly to the eternal values of God and country...

...Like good fiction, they cut through thickets of bewildering facts to help us arrive at fundamental truths...

...Example: Newport correctly notes that the collective judgment of Americans in the 1960s gave the civil rights movement a crucial base of support...

...A successful Presidential narrative creates a bond between the President and the nation.' As for spin, well, Cornog seems to say, don't worry too much about it—Presidential narratives have always been subject to it...

...Look at the way President Bush has been flip-flopping since his inauguration to placate whims of the religious Right...

...He simply did what he thought was right...

...The wonder is that he got as close as he did to winning it...

...Like democracy itself, the politics of personality has been with us from the start...

...Though Carter understood politics, Reagan understood America...

...they have to function in the political jungle that has enveloped Washington from the start...

...Then there are lobbyists and the big-time campaign contributors...

...The wonder is not that he lost the race...

...The result is an engaging but frustrating book...

...Still, Carter was trounced for re-election in 1980 by a Hollywood movie actor who could convey Main Street values infinitely better than the real thing...

...They distill complex issues to their essence and help even conscientious voters arrive at sound decisions...

...Joseph Dolman, a longtime contributor to The New Leader, is a New York City-based columnist and editorialist/or Newsday...

...When Jimmy Carter sold himself to Americans in 1976 as an honest Main Street guy who would give the United States a government as decent as its people, he was about as close as it gets to the real thing...

...He cites the reasons they designed a representative democracy and the safeguard that a strong judiciary—together with the Bill of Rights—provides...

...Newport believes officeholders who resist this approach today do so largely out of vanity and ego...

...That is not how you make a strong impression...

...He took the Democratic Party to a morally superior place, but if the country came out of the bargain far healthier than it had been, his party lost for winning...

...A candidate needs a dramatic life to craft a dramatic story...

...Consequently, Carter went back to his Sunday school class at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, while Reagan, who learned his craft on the Warner Brothers back lots and at the negotiation table for the Screen Actors Guild, went on to espouse the values of ordinary Americans everywhere...

...The pity is, instead of hard analysis Cornog often lets his own narrative wander from one political tale to another...

...The 2004 game began the instant Kerry locked up the Democratic nomination...

...He pushed through Congress the Public Accommodations Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, plus a host of other laws—and handed over a solidly Democratic South to the Republicans...

...The story that endured about George Washington did not include his mistakes in the French and Indian War...

...As Johnson proved, even a scurrilous President can sometimes rise to greatness...

...And his theses about the bedrock wisdom of the American people are fascinating—even if they ultimately fall short...

...To his credit, Newport makes a knowledgeable argument...

...Once a majority of Americans reached a conclusion on, say, gun control, our leaders would move to carry out their dictates...

...The commercials reminded viewers of Kerry's exemplary military service in Vietnam—an implied contrast to Bush's lackluster military career...

...Yet Evan Cornog maintains in his new book, The Power and the Story (Penguin, 307 pp., $24.95), that the use of the carefully crafted narrative on balance helps bring campaigns alive to Americans...

...Richard M. Nixon came next, and if a majority of Americans by the early 1970s was perturbed by his reactionary Southern strategy, it wasn't obvious...

...This may seem a deplorable way to determine who will occupy the most potent office on earth for the next four years, but there you have the reality...

...There is another lesson to be drawn from Gore's failure: If you want the voters to like you, you have to like yourself first...

...You could never say that of a poll-driven robot...

...How would Newport break their grip...

...His chapters on the emergence of polling as a science are superb...

...Newport professes a profound confidence in the ultimate wisdom of the people, yet the people seem to respect politicians who use not only the polls but their own best judgment to guide them...

...But for a brief moment he did not worry about where the polls would go...

...And are the people always right...

...When he was criticized as dull and didactic, he took to wearing earth tones to soften his image...

...How well does it do this...

...That specter almost makes me happy to contemplate the endless rounds of attack ads that will hold television viewers hostage until November...

...But the candidate who comes out on top will in all probability be the fellow who can chisel his caricature of the other guy the most deeply into the psyche of the nation...

...Of course not...

...To begin with, they don't live in Newport's neat world of precise questions and yes or no answers...

...Sometimes it reaches insane extremes—as former President Bill Clinton attests in his effusive memoir...

...And here is where the magic of narrative and presentation gets especially interesting: Even when most Americans did not like Reagan's ideas, they loved the man who played President...

...His book, Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People (Warner, 320 pp., $26.00), is really two books...

...I kept waiting in vain for Cornog to explain how all of these factors fit together to shape the outcome of elections...

...it stressed his heroics as a Revolutionary War general...

...He knew how to stand solid for his beliefs and in the process sound more like Gary Cooper than a preachy scold...

...In Newport's ideal world, you would need the President's judgment only in emergencies or to help the nation muddle along when public opinion is ambiguous...

...Presidential campaigns are not only about narratives...

...Fortunately, a strong President, Lyndon B. Johnson, understood how narrow the window was for civil rights progress and he acted with uncommon speed to put the legal framework for broad societal desegregation into place before it slammed shut...

...Writers & Writing Between Personality and the Polls By Joseph Dolman Political purists who incessantly nag candidates to "stick to the issues" will probably wind up with another case of dyspepsia this year...

...Johnson knew that would happen...

...The fact that Gore seemed destined for the White House is "probably one of the reasons he did not make it...

...He had a splendid story to tell...

...After the Bush camp tried to tar him as a waffler, he went on the air in crucial battleground states with a series of spots that were more subtle than biting...

...Or should it be the President and Congress...

...His formula reduces the complexity of power, governance and morality to a single question: What is the wisdom of the people...

...One is a clear-eyed defense of polling and a meticulous account of how pollsters work...

...Should every politician respond to the polls in a knee-jerk manner...

...Some of the best packagers and spinners in the business are set to trumpet the virtues of George W. Bush and John Kerry in a multimillion-dollar, poll-driven version of Who Do You Trust?—a competition that will borrow state-of-the-art devices from the great American fantasy machines of Hollywood and Madison Avenue...

...Presidential stories are a means of shorthand, he says...

...It was never quite clear that Gore was comfortable in his own skin...

...This power, he adds, can be used for good ends or bad ends, it can be used responsibly or irresponsibly, but the really important thing to bear in mind is: "Stories have power in politics because they have power everywhere in our lives, and it is no good wishing that weren't so...

...He talks about the qualms of the Founding Fathers regarding direct democracy...

...He knew how to communicate his ideas—many of them radical for the time—without threatening the electorate...

...One reason Al Gore was such an unsympathetic character," Cornog says, "is that his life held so little drama—he was elected to the House at age 28, to the Senate at 36 and to the Vice Presidency at 44...

...What's more, the American love for tough-minded individualism and the heroic narrative would instantly reject a President who functioned as a mere clerk-in-chief...

...They may be more discerning than the elitists of academe and the media care to admit, but they are also prone to major error...

...Although Cornog's anecdotes make for good reading, I wish he had been more analytical...

...It has always been messy and undignified...

...Cornog, an associate dean at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, thinks it is not so deplorable, and he may be onto something...

...A Bush television ad that went on the air in April opened with this voice-over: "John Kerry says, ? lot of people don't really know who I am.' Well, actually, a lot of people do," the voice sneered...

...These funhouse-mirror images bear scant resemblance to the truth...

...The other is a quixotic call for politicians to pay more—infinitely more—attention to the polls and to act decisively when the numbers in dicate an indisputable consensus...

...They further noted that the Massachusetts Senator has spent his entire adult life in public service—tacitly inviting a comparison with the President's meandering and dissolute early adulthood...

...They continue to nurse visions of a national discussion about matters ranging from AIDS to education to civil liberties to stem-cell research, but the early evidence indicates that the chances of this happening are pretty slim...

...Kerry's hometown paper says, 'In his continuing effort to be all things to all voters John Kerry is engaging in a level of doublespeak that makes most voters wince.'" To prevail in November, Kerry will have to treat Bush in kind...

...Nevertheless, the author glosses over many questions...

...In Newport's ideal world, politicians in Congress and the White House would act almost as bookkeepers...

...While hope may spring eternal on newspaper editorial boards and in university political science departments for a high-minded battle of ideas before an alert and informed electorate, the campaign already shows signs of getting lowdown, mean and personal...

...But by the time he ran for the Presidency in 2000, he seemed to have lost his way...

...Newport never quite says...

...Strangely for a journalism educator, too, Cornog says little about the press in the whole process...

...In short, he came across as a guy struggling, a guy needing consultants to tell him who he was...

...But is this bad...

...Carter hated affectation...

...One could almost say the Kerry ads buttressed Bush's view of the Senator as a pathological waverer...

...Like most Southern Democrats of his era, the Congressman from Tennessee was a reliable moderate who kept a studied distance from the party's troublesome liberal wing...

...Kerry was trying to compare himself favorably to Bush without quite committing himself to a direct fight in the open...

...Gore inexplicably conducted a populist campaign—despite his having served as Vice President through the longest economic boom in the nation's history...

...When he was criticized for a stiff public demeanor, he shifted to open-neck shirts...

...Logic suggests that its role of separating the authentic narratives from the phony ones is essential...

...Clinton was widely reviled for using polls to determine where the First Family would vacation...

...Newport believes we—communicating directly through public opinion surveys—should tell our elected officials what to do...

...But that support took a century to build and it vanished with breathtaking speed...

...I would rather have a President in office who is guilty of every charge leveled against him on television than I would an automaton...

...If that ever happened, it would obviate most of Cornog's argument about the importance of the well-crafted narrative in politics...

...As often as not, Cornog suggests, the obvious excellence of an Abraham Lincoln or a Thomas Jefferson will ultimately overwhelm the inevitable vicious counterstories spread by their detractors...

...Where Cornog stresses the ethereal nature of leadership...

...Whatever the specifics of the stories that emerge, the 2004 race, like all the Presidential elections that have come before it, will be defined by the power of stories," Cornog predicts...

...Or maybe it will pit Kerry, the Vietnam War hero and natural heir to the legacy of President John F. Kennedy, against Bush, the feckless son of privilege who has never quite managed to prove himself when it mattered...

...Although the Presidential campaign will have to deal with the war in Iraq, the economy and the Bush Administration's degree of preparedness for 9/11, a large part of the debate is shaping up as a match between dueling biographies...

...It would be great to have Comog sit down with Gallup pollster Frank Newport for a little chitchat...

...Politicians from George W. Bush to New York's Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proudly declare that they do not use polls to tell them how to govern...

...That makes Johnson a hero in my book...

...He was a working peanut farmer, a sincere humanitarian, a Sunday school teacher, and a reform-minded governor of Georgia who left the state in far better condition than he found it...