When All the World Is a Stage

1992 was the year that presidential politics began adapting to the video age. Larry King and Rush Limbaugh replaced Teddy White in the "making of the president" franchise. Ross Perot tosses off a remark on a call-in show; a year later his spectral presence dominates the congressional budget process and constricts President Clinton's maneuvering room on economic policy in general.

1992 was also the year that a major party candidate, namely our new Number One, campaigned on Phil Donahue, MTV, and Arsenio Hall. His challenger (remember Bush?) remained stuck in his old hard-news rut, and thereby bit the big one.

Throughout the primary and fall campaigns, Clinton showed an extraordinary sense of the way TV and the other electronic media now function in people's lives: intimately and interactively. His style reflected that living-room, touch-tone style. Even his paid TV campaign emphasized town meetings and person-on-the-street testimonies more than the authoritarian repetition of 30-second spots ... not out of principle, unfortunately, but out of an understanding that the viewing-and-voting public had grown hip to overt manipulation.

The Clinton presidency so far continues to show that user-friendly, video-ready style. The White House seems determined to use the presidency not just as Teddy Roosevelt's "bully pulpit," but as a sort of bully "chat line" as well. The president's communications staff has been organizing mass call-ins to the more popular radio shows to cool the flames in that right-wing hotbed.

Previous Democratic politicians have been as averse to TV chatter and call-in democracy as they have been to most other aspects of real-life American culture. But Bill Clinton -- himself a child of Howdy Doody, Johnny Carson, and Dick Clark -- seems to delight in his starring role in the long-running series, Mr. Clinton Goes to Washington.

The process of putting on a TV show began with Clinton's inaugural beginning. With his pre-inaugural pilgrimage to Monticello and the simultaneous ringing of all those surrogate Liberty Bells, Clinton managed to put over the illusion that his own, fairly modest, electoral victory was a cause for non-partisan national celebration.

At the same time, the themes of the inaugural events evoked images of Clinton's own favored version of the American mythos. That is the vision of the American civic community as an extended family which draws strength from its diversity and interdependence. That is very "Politically Correct" stuff when you break it down. However, it came couched not in the insular jargon of correctitude, but in the down-home Americanisms of a "family reunion" on the Washington Mall. It was a fiesta that, not coincidentally, also provided a weeklong stream of video-friendly images for the ready and willing consumption of the network evening news.

ALL OF THIS STUFF about Clinton's image-making is fascinating on the pop-cultural level, but it also matters enormously in political terms. What people get from television is not just a literal message but an emotional connection, and even a sense of personal relationship. Such non-rational perception often moves political behavior more effectively than conscious and calculated argument.

The Reaganauts raised the role of Mr. Television President (as opposed to real-life Chief Executive) to its position of highest eminence. Bill Clinton well knows that for decades to come presidential accomplishment will be judged by the standard of the first Reagan term, which was primarily a television success.

The actual content of that early-'80s Reagan Revolution was horrendous. But the technique by which it was sold was brilliant and, in its own perverse way, a thing of beauty. The Reagan administration had a "message of the day" that focused on one of their pet issues or programs. The "message" was passed to every political appointee in the administration and that is what they were expected to talk about in all their media contacts that day. As a result the network evening news shows, over and over and over again, reflected the version of reality that the Reaganaut clique wished to perpetuate.

The Reagan team also regularly got the Gipper out of the big house and up in front of picturesque or evocative visual locations for his speeches. Then they made judicious use of the ultimate White House weapon, the ability to commandeer a swath of prime-time from the three commercial networks.

The Clinton administration has adopted all of these tactics and more to their own re-imaging project. Given the bonus of a president who can actually think on his feet and speak extemporaneously, they've added the tactic of the "town meeting" where the president meets face-to-face, and via closed-circuit, with a collection of average citizens to debate directly the public business.

And now we hear that the president will again jump the fence and appear on non-news TV shows in his attempts to reach out and touch the American people. Personally, I'd like to see Hillary Rodham Clinton show up on Roseanne pushing health care reform.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.