Presidential Campaigns And American Self Images

Arthur H Miller, Bruce E Gronbeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367299651
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000308051
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume explores a central political paradox: why American scholars, journalists, and citizens periodically question the viability of their presidential electoral system and yet believe that presidential elections are our best hope for tomorrow. The book argues that the key to understanding this paradox lies in the concept of "self-image," exploring relationships between campaign activities and political culture. After presenting an introduction to the history of presidential campaigning and a theory of political image, the book arranges essays in three parts: images centered on candidates, mass media, and the public. A final essay assesses explanations of the contrasts between the 1988 and 1992elections and suggests tomorrow's research agenda.

Part One
Presidential Campaigning in America

1
The Study of Presidential Campaigning: Yesterday's Campaigns and Today's Issues

Bruce E. Gronbeck and Arthur H. Miller

[W]e have entered a political era in which electoral choices are of little consequence because an electoral system in disarray can generate neither the party unity nor the levels of public agreement necessary to forge a winning and effective political coalition. The underlying explanation is that the political and economic forces driving our national politics have created a system in which the worst tendencies of the political culture—the hype, hoopla, and negativity—have been elevated to the norm in elections, gaining a systematic dominance in campaign content as never before (p. 14).

With these words political scientist Lance Bennett launched a book The Governing Crisis: Media, Money, and Marketing in American Elections (1992) that captured much of the disgust and frustration that affected even scholars of political campaigning during the early 1990s. Not only did 19 percent of the American voters in 1992 cast their ballots for the independent candidate H. Ross Perot, but we suspect an even larger percentage of the academy's professional election junkies talked of presidential campaigning in harsh, even condemnatory terms.

Consider the scene as Campaign '92 was opening:

• America witnessed a steady decline in voter turnout over the previous thirty years, coming dangerously close to a minority election in 1988, when only 50.1 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots.
• Incumbents were being returned to the U.S. House of Representatives at a 98 percent clip.
• The 1988 elections, from local to presidential contests, cost the country $2,727,500,000—an amount more than double what had been spent in 1980 (Alexander & Bauer 1991).
• One presidential candidate was facing possible federal charges for Iran-Gate, another was having his marital problems spread across even respectable newspapers, senators were facing questions of undue influence in the wake of the Keating Five's humiliation, and an alarmingly high percentage of House members were found to have bounced checks on Capitol Hill.
• During the fall of 1991 a Supreme Court nominee was despoiled by charges of sexual harassment and obscene conversation.
• By 1990, 77 percent of those polled thought the U.S. government was run for the benefit of a few big interests—triple the percentage who expressed that belief in 1960 (Miller & Borrelli 1991; Bennett 1992).

There is little wonder that Wilson Carey McWilliams ended an electoral post mortem with these sentiments: "For both Republicans and Democrats, the election of 1988 indicates the need for a new civility, and for the kinds of word and deed necessary to affirm, for the coming century, the dignity of self-government" (Pomper et al. 1989, p. 200).

Το help us understand how America's vision of its own political system can be so stained, what elements of that system seem responsible for our current self image, and yet why most voters think an election will bring a better tomorrow, this introduction will touch on the history of American presidential campaigning, offer what we think is a constructive understanding of the idea of "political image," and then preview the themes of the rest of the book.

Electoral Booming with "The Voice of Grog"

In 1888 the Scottish scholar James Bryce observed that "an American election is held to be, truly or falsely, largely a matter of booming" (quoted in Jamieson 1984, p. 3). He was impressed with the steady stream of "booms"—processions, bands, flags, badges, and enthusiastic spectators— that marked the three-month contest. Tocqueville was equally impressed with American campaigning:

The political activity that pervades the United States must be seen in order to be understood. No sooner do you set foot upon American ground than you are stunned by a kind of tumult... To take in hand the regulation of society, arid to discuss it, is his biggest concern, and so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows (quoted in Bennett 1992, p. 69).

The free-wheeling, display-oriented political campaign has always been a part of the American experience. Our practices of "electing time" (Black 1973) are not a product of the electronic age. A visit to the Smithsonian Institution's Division of Political History and its presidential campaign collection will demonstrate that "politics had been a spectator sport before television" (Melder 1992, p. vii). Madison may have decried the "spiritual liquor and other treats" that appeared during electing time (quoted in Bennett 1992, p. 67), but he could not stem the flow.

American politics has always turned on more than the great issues of controlling resources. Even during the first complete election year, 1792, a newspaper editor opined "That the Voice of the People, was the Voice of Grog"— a reference to the "Treats" Madison abhorred (quoted in Boller 1985, p. 6). Political labels bloomed that year as well, with vice-presidential candidate John Adams called "His Rotundity" and "His Superfluous Excellency"; the Republican paper, the Massachusetts Centinel, was bothered by his "lawless lust of POW'R in embryo," describing him as "the first spawn of hell" (Shields-West 1992, pp. 5-6).

Public display, various methods for securing voter allegiances, and scurrilous campaigning are deeply embedded characteristics of American electoral culture. The Adams-Jefferson election of 1796 was a free-for-all, as hired horsemen carried ad hominem attacks on handbills around New England. By 1828, the electors favoring Andrew Jackson or John Quincy Adams were tallied in newspapers, and the electorate tripled that year, excited by the legend of "Old Hickory"; Jackson enthusiasts marched through town squares carrying tall hickory poles, wearing hats adorned with twigs from that tree. In 1852, Gen. Winfield Scott, Whig opponent of Franklin Pierce, was the "Hero of Vera Cruz" or "Old Fuss and Feathers" to his supporters, but a "military chieftain" who believed only in "Gunpowder Glory" to the Democrats.

Lincoln's second campaign was racially coded, as the Democrats wanted "The Constitution as It Is, The Union as It Was, and the Negroes Where They Are"; Lincoln was taunted with the song "Fight for the Nigger," even as his supporters sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic," "We Are Coming Father Abraham, 600,000 More," and "Rally Round the Cause, Boys." In 1872, after Horace Greeley lost the early (September) elections, he took the unprecedented step of campaigning on his own behalf, giving more than 200 speeches about Grant's scandals and the bloody Civil War. The New York Sun said the race was "a shower of mud."

McKinley's front porch campaign of 1896 featured altered ambulations. As he sat on his front porch, delegations would parade by him; by election day some 750,000 people representing thirty states had passed by. His only real problem was souvenir hunters, who all but destroyed his grass, frontyard fence, and famous porch. In 1900, Theodore Roosevelt, a more animated campaigner, joined his ticket, putting on 21,000 miles at a speed that led Mr. Dooley to comment, "'Tis Tiddy alone that's runnin', an' he ain't a-runnin', he galiopin'." John Hay said Roosevelt was "more fun than a goat." In his turn in 1912, Woodrow Wilson was an even more aggressive campaigner, establishing once and for all the party representative's right and even obligation to move among the people with pomp and promises.

But it was 1924 that brought probably the biggest change to American presidential campaigning. That year saw the entry of both the campaign film, a biographical construction of Calvin Coolidge's life, and radio into elections. Coolidge's silent film was exhibited across the country in movie houses (Monreale, Chapter 2). Radio was important for the presentation of the political conventions, especially the seventeen-day, politically charged marathon the Democrats mounted (Becker & Lower 1962).

The step to televisual politics in the 1950s was shorter than many assume: it united the immediacy and livingroom penetration of radio with the visuality (at least once the technology improved in the 1960s) of film, offering the complete multi- and mass-mediated discourse that characterizes electoral politics today. Visual ads came in earnest in 1952, as did televised convention coverage; computerization was approached seriously by the Kennedy's in the 1960s, and Boorstin's pseudo-events (1961) became the stock in trade of electioneering aimed at getting candidates on the evening news (see Jamieson 1984; Boller 1985; Melder 1992; Shields-West 1992).

A complete history of presidential campaigning would present endless parades, songfests, sloganeering, salooning, sun-drenched and torch light rallies, promises and preachments, big lies and little truths, and enough words to disturb even the Valley of Tranquillity. The campaign practices of particular years are symptoms of the American political culture—signs of what we value, what we seek to reform, who we are, what we fear in the world around us, and whom candidates hope we become. For all of the "treats" Madison snorted about, for all the silliness many associate with cheesehead hats from Wisconsin and with the' Republicans' vaunted balloon drops during conventions, and for all of the cynicism that creeps into news stories and op-ed commentaries on the quadrennial rite, we can learn much about the American political culture by studying its campaign practices carefully.

The Centrality and Complexity of "Political Image"

Presidential campaigns have been subjected to multiple and divergent modes of study and commentary. Campaign managers and media consultants have been writing books about the making, packaging, and selling of presidential candidates at least since Joe McGinnis (1969) demonstrated that there is a sizable audience for such work. Political scientists in recent years have focused on the mechanisms of campaign operations (e.g., Orren & Polsby 1987), predictions of voter behavior (e.g., Patterson 1980), and the effects of campaigning on electoral outcomes (Bennett 1992). Since Theodore White's successful The Making of the President series (1961, 1965, 1969, 1973), some journalists and many professors of journalism have stepped back from mere reporting to write about campaign processes, particularly the role of media and reportage in shaping and framing the stories featured in various campaigns, as well as the roles of debates, endorsements, ads, and news content on elections (e.g., Davis 1992). Students of history have generally featured particular candidates (e.g., McGinnis 1969) or aspects of campaigns (e.g., Duncan, 1991). Communication specialists have studied audience responses to various sorts of campaign messages (e.g., Nimmo & Combs 1990) and rhetorical critics, especially, recently have examined the sociodrama acted every four years (e.g., Trent & Friedenberg 1991).

While each of these approaches has taught us much about presidential campaigning, most disciplinary vantages have failed to integrate the pieces into an overarching conception of campaigns or to sketch the big picture: a broad, cross-disciplinary, theoretically rich understanding of presidential campaigning as an important arena within which American culture is constructed, as well as something relevant to the operations and general well being of American society. That is the burden of this book.

The key to comprehending relationships between campaign activities and both American culture and American political practices, we believe, is to make sense of and take seriously the idea of the "political image." We must grasp the processes of what Parenti calls "inventing reality" (1986/ 1993) as they occur through campaign activities. And, we must understand that invented political realities are precisely that—realities. What is real in political society is that which is paid attention to, defined, valued, disputed, and ultimately seized powerfully by some segment or another of political society. Furthermore, by noting what is talked about as important or significant in any given election, we can index the state of the political culture—of what we call American self images—at the time.

The word "image" is a rich one, not only in English but also well back into its Latin roots. Imago was a dense term, having associated with it not only the notion of likeness or imitation, but also phantom or fantasy in one direction and idea or conception in the other (OED). Central to this range of uses for the word is the vantage of the human spectator, the act of looking, the data of vision. A political image at bottom is that which is seen in political contexts and what is made of that which is seen. It is no accident that Murray Edelman introduced his groundbreaking The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964) with the argument that

For most men most of the time politics is a series of pictures in the mind, placed there by television news, newspapers, magazines, and discussions. The pictures creates a moving panorama taking place in a world the mass public never quite touches, yet one its members come to fear or cheer, often with passion and sometimes with action ... Politics is for most of us a passing parade of abstract symbols, yet a parade which our experience teaches us to be a benevolent or malevolent force that can be close to omnipotent (p. 5).

What must be made absolutely clear in all this is that politics is not somehow unreal or false because it is freighted with symbols and visualized in images. We cannot somehow dismiss showmanship, political ritual, speeches, and televised debates as "mere politics." Politics, after all, is a human or social activity. A coal field is but compressed and solidified petroleum until political-nationalist values are attached to it in a dispute between France and Germany and it has no political significance until people contend for its energy-producing capabilities. A coal field is but a natural phenomenon until converted symbolically into a political value, i.e., until it is assigned human significance and made an object of collective worth. The political is symbolic to its core.

The consequences of politics, of course, are very, very real. The whimsy possible in poetry, wherein symbols can be wholly liberated from the dasein, the out-there, usually is not present in political discourse, for, as Kertzer (1988, p. 4) notes, "There is a continuous interaction [in politics] between the ways people have of dealing with the physical and social universe and the actual contours of that universe." Kertzer takes "interaction" as his key metaphor. We can go further than that in suggesting that, in politics, the symbolic and the real are amalgamated. Politics amalgamates symbolic meaning—of signification, of attitudes, of values—with the structures and resources of the social and physical worlds. Political images are the lenses with which we look at those amalgamations.

Presidential Campaigning and American Self Images

What is different about this book, then, is that we treat the political campaign and election as an enlarged process of social construction. Through the various chapters, we elaborate on three centers of activity by which Americans construct political images and discursive rationales for the way we go about campaigning and for what the outcomes of campaigns "ought" to be. (1) One important center for symbolic activity is the candidates, their organized staffs, and agents. On the bases of previous experience, polling information, the behest of organized interest groups, and the advice of various consultants, candidates construct campaign events and messages that sculpt images of themselves and their opponents, the citizenry and its role in a free society, and American society itself. (2) The mass media take up aspects of these messages as well as others they themselves build. Some parts of candidates' messages are transmitted passively, as though the media were mere conduits; more frequently, the media are actively framing messages in unexpected ways, as they select what to cover, interject conflict and drama through juxtapositions and narration, and tell us what to expect as they interpret and evaluate what we have seen. The print and electronic media thus are both reconstructing candidates' messages and constructing a set of their own. (3) The public, in turn, ignores, adjusts, responds to, and evaluates all of these messages.

This sorting is not a passive act. The voter-citizen is an active participant in the process of social construction. Considerable writing on voter behavior (e.g., Campbell et al. 1960; Abramson et al. 1990) treats election outcomes as the sum of individual-level reactions to the candidates, issues, and parties encountered in the campaign. Our approach is different in that we treat the citizen-voter as actively engaged in constructing political meanings and reality out of the myriad messages and symbols that they encounter in a campaign. This includes not only images of the various candidates—the tax and spend liberal image of Dukakis in 1988, the caring, young populist version of Clinton in 1992—but also constructed self-perceptions of the voters themselves and a collective public itself (see Merkle & Miller, Chapter 9).

The public's responses generally are drawn between positive and negative poles: at times, they react with hope to portrayals of a new world, and at other times, with fear and pessimism to negative portrayals of opponents and the state of the Republic at large. Individuals do all this privately in small gatherings and—more intriguingly today—publicly in the form of opinion polls.

Across the now-almost two years that comprise an American presidential campaign—from the preannouncement visits to Iowa to the mythic celebrations at conventions and on to the election eve visits in candidates' livingrooms—the candidates, the press, and the public construct verbal-visual images of each other. Somehow, amidst all of the thousands upon thousands of messages that come at us via print, radio, television, bumper stickers, cartop signs, billboards, buttons, ribbons, and airplane trailers over the football stadiums of autumn, we hold an election. We do more than merely elect someone president. We create and experience self images of those candidates, the press's place in society, and ourselves as citizens. Those self images are affirmed in the process of campaigning, and fina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One Presidential Campaigning in America
• Part Two Candidate-Generated Images in Presidential Campaigns
• Part Three Mass-Mediated Images in Presidential Campaigns
• Part Four Images of the Voter-Citizen in Presidential Campaigns
• Part Five Presidential Campaigning and American Self Images: Agenda for Tomorrow's Research
• About the Book
• About the Editors and the Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index