As Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ready themselves for a debate that is likely to reach more than 100 million viewers, both candidates will recall the outcome of the first, infamous televised encounter between Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy. Clinton and Trump will face against each other fifty-six years years to the day after Kennedy – a young, relatively unknown Catholic senator from Massachusetts – derailed the Nixon campaign with his made-for-television demeanour. Nixon was still recovering from an illness and looked underweight, and unshaven; Kennedy, on the other hand was perfectly tanned, and coiffed, and looked radiant. Frank Stanton, president of CBS at the time of the debate, later recalled that “Kennedy was bronzed beautifully…Nixon looked like death.”
Nixon’s camp discounted the effect his appearance would have on the viewers and they relied on his greater political experience to carry the day. They assumed that he would dispatch Kennedy with words alone. The assumption wasn’t entirely wrong – a poll later showed that radio audiences felt that Nixon won the debate – but it misread the ways that television would alter impressions of, and assumptions about, a candidate. Seventy-four million people watched the debate and Kennedy’s strong showing arguably catapulted him all the way to the White House. When, in retrospect, the full extent of the damage to the Nixon campaign became clear, subsequent candidates avoided the medium altogether. Televised debates disappeared from the next four elections, returning only in 1976 when Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter gave the format another chance. Since then televised debates have been a staple of the US elections.
Judging from the New York Times’ account of how the candidates have prepared for the exchange, Monday night’s debate will be as stark a confrontation of styles and perhaps as consequential as the first Kennedy-Nixon encounter. Mrs Clinton, the seasoned politician, is polishing her delivery, arming herself with facts, well-reasoned arguments and a handful of provocations that may bait her thin-skinned rival into losing his cool. Mr Trump, on the other hand, has forgone such labours. He insists on retaining his extempore style – or, as he might put it, not tinkering with the brand. Since Kellyanne Conway, a veteran political strategist, took over his campaign Trump has softened his hectoring tone, in hopes of appearing more presidential, but he remains at heart a street-fighting debater. Faced with facts, solid arguments and intelligence, he plays to an audience’s emotions. Rather than get lost in the weeds of policy, or fact-checking he deploys phrases that never quite amount to falsifiable propositions, then claims that, unlike his opponent, he knows what it takes to make the deals that will “make America great again.”
In 1985 the American media critic Neil Postman published a brilliant account of how television had reshaped public discourse in America. In ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ Postman warned that the format tended to favour what we now call media personalities. Advertisers and marketers had mastered the new medium so completely that it was foolish to believe that old-fashioned notions of competence, experience and calm rationality could prevail. Presciently, Postman observed that “American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display; that, in fact, half the principles of capitalism as praised by Adam Smith or condemned by Karl Marx are irrelevant.” What matters more is how an audience feels about a product. Or, as US political analysts like to say, which one of these candidates would you prefer to have a drink with?
Postman raised concerns that “the perception of the truth of a report rests heavily on the acceptability of the newscaster” and that television audiences might “banish those who tell us the news when we do not care for the face of the teller.” He worried that “credibility” would degenerate into mere plausibility, and that it might eventually mean not “the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing” but “the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one or more) conveyed by the actor/reporter.” He lamented that “If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude.”
From its inception Donald Trump’s campaign has remained untroubled by reality and focused on verisimilitude. In the primaries, sixteen of his rivals ridiculed his shoot-from-the-hip approach and then watched in disbelief as he swept them aside. Now, the Democrats realize that they have to take his populist style more seriously. Hard as it is for the newspaper-reading middle-class to acknowledge, the truth is that Trump is more “credible” and “acceptable” to tens of millions of working class Americans and he knows how to leverage his “blue-collar billionaire” personality on TV.
Hillary Clinton should not assume that her knowledge and experience will suffice for the purposes of television. To vanquish Trump she cannot simply refute him, for that will merely turn her into an unwelcome truth-teller, a type of personality that, as Postman noted, television viewers dislike. Instead, she must find a way to dispel the illusion of Trump, to reveal the little man behind the curtain. If she does this successfully, Trump’s self-sabotaging tendencies will do the rest. If 100 million viewers get to see this ignorant, blustering charlatan in full cry then the race for the White House will, effectively, be over.
