Body-Language Politics

By Thomas Griffith

Nowadays television does not simply cover campaigns, it has become the place where campaigns are enacted. Among other humiliations in being a presidential candidate is to be patronized by television interviewers. Anyone can find an awkward question to put to a candidate, but the candidate knows that a hasty, imprudent reply can haunt him for months. No wonder the questioner seems more assured. The viewer gets so used to candidates truckling to self-important television types that the three-hour Democratic debate in New Hampshire provided two refreshing exceptions. Interviewer Phil Donahue, a gregarious veteran of morning TV talk shows, was cautioned by Walter Mondale not to wag his finger at him, while the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who knows a thing about crowd playing too, advised the bullying Donahue to slow down his act. This was more of a knockabout debate than the League of Women Voters' solemn civic lessons. Never mind that it was more demeaning, it was better television, and the candidates do seek attention.

Some White House aides concluded that none of the eight candidates looked presidential enough. Now cozy in the presidential palace (on a four-year lease, renewable to eight), they perhaps have forgotten how Ronald Reagan, in a similar Republican free-for-all in 1980, interrupted the moderator, "I'm paying for this microphone." Very effective, but not very presidential.

The public obviously wants candidates put through their paces rather than carried into office, but it is a hardening process without any real rules. So candidates develop rote answers to predictable questions, and interviewers try to knock them off balance. These impromptu answers become the real television discussion of the issues instead of the candidate's full speech that is never heard.

In the earlier days of Cronkite, Huntley and Chancellor, Presidents and potential Presidents were treated with some deference. Dan Rather's defiance of Nixon, scandalous at the time, began the real change. Now the preferred style is a harrying, rapid-fire crossexamination, not hostile but not chummy either. The masters are Ted Koppel ("But, sir, you haven't answered my question"), Bill Monroe, Sam Donaldson. They allow their subjects no easy outs or blurred distinctions. It's show time. Mixed in with these are opinionated questioners, such as George F. Will and Robert Novak, who bring decided views over from their editorial-page columning. Put together Donaldson's blunt demeanor and Will's ideological questions on This Week with David Brinkley, and Brinkley, who once seemed acerb, comes out courtly by contrast. But then Brinkley was never as fiercely acerbic as his reputation; the targets of his own wry remarks tend to be "politicians," "bureaucrats," "generals," but only rarely individuals cited by name.

Visually, the apotheosis of TV star journalism was ABC's nuclear panel that followed The Day After. Like a Supreme Court Justice, Koppel stared down at the likes of Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Robert McNamara, who tried to catch his eye or answer his questions. In New Hampshire Koppel sat democratically alongside the eight candidates, visually their equal, not their superior.

The one politician who usually wins such tests with interviewers is Ronald Reagan. The questioner may seem to be exposing Reagan's unfamiliarity with a subject, but should he press too hard, Reagan, with a gesture or a light remark, will suddenly seem to win the exchange. The impressionism of television is what makes it so powerful and unaccountable. Robert M. Teeter, who polls for Republicans, once carried out an experiment with two groups of ten and twelve people. He showed them a brief bit of videotape of politicians they did not know. The sound was off; the candidate was seen campaigning, shaking hands. Viewers were then asked to judge whether they found the candidates honest, caring, experienced and qualified. Teeter's "somewhat surprising finding," he told David Burnham of the New York Times, was that such viewers rated these politicians they did not know "just about the same as people who presumably know about their actual positions and performance." Body language may be the new communications signal in campaigns. It may not be a onetime aberration that an actor became President. Perhaps all future politicians will have to develop these qualities. One just hopes that the content and wisdom of their views will still matter.