Character, showbiz and elections campaigns

By Ian Buruma

LONDON: Isn't it time we left election campaigns to the pros? Just as modern art has merged seamlessly with the world of advertising and marketing, politics is now a branch of showbiz. British comic Rory Bremner, known for his brilliant impersonations of top British, politicians deserved a place on that Labour campaign bus, because he is a more influential political commentator than the estimable Hugo Young.

And since the campaigns have become meticulously directed stage shows, it seems entirely apt that some of the most interesting campaign reports have been written by experts, such as David Hare, a playwright, and James Fenton, a distinguished former drama critic.

As usual, the Americans are way ahead of us. Not only did they elect a former Hollywood actor as president, which makes perfect sense really, and a star from pro wrestling (another branch of showbiz) as governor of Minnesota, but their political conventions have been staged as theatrical events for years.

Far from throwing their most famous comedians off campaign buses, American candidates actively court them. If you wish to be president of the U.S., you had better get your agent to book you on the David Letterman show, or an evening with Jay Leno. And you had better knock them dead.

Of course, even in the U.S., candidates are not always up to it. The sight of George W. trying to be jocular with Letterman was so embarrassing that even Letterman was lost for words. What saved Bush is that Al Gore's performance was even worse.

Just how showbizzy American campaigns have become was brought home to me during the televised "debates". These, too, are well- rehearsed, largely scripted events, where the candidates are judged on their performances, their delivery, their emotional projections, their body language, the color of their ties, the timing of their gags, their haircuts and so on.

Here Bush did better, simply because he did very little at all, while Gore, in the first "debate", flailed about like a wild man, shouting and gesticulating and running about the stage. The fact that his points were usually well taken, while Bush's grasp of the issues looked decidedly shaky, was irrelevant. Gore bombed.

So his minders got to work on his act. And how did they do this? By replaying a tape of television comedians doing imitations of Gore. This, they told the hapless Gore, is how he "came across". And so, based on a tape of Saturday Night Live, Gore changed his act. Gore tried to look like Bush, but ended up looking as if he had taken a horse tranquiliser. He bombed again.

The reason Gore bombed is that people thought his change of style made him look "insincere". This is very strange. Everyone knows that the debates, like everything else in campaign circuses, are staged as spectacles; so why do they want the actors to be sincere?

It is interesting that the question of sincerity, indeed the obsession with "character", should have become so important at the very moment that politics became indistinguishable from showbiz.

Celebrity culture has made us more cynical. The harder spin doctors stage-manage their clients' performances, the more we want to dig for character.

Ronald Reagan had no problem with this, since the borders between his theatrical and his "real" self were fuzzy in his own mind; or perhaps they did not exist at all.

Tony Blair has a problem, not as much as Gore had a problem, but a problem nonetheless. He knows how to act sincere. Indeed, in public, he does little else. He is so sincere that everyone who disagrees with him is assumed to have a problem. He is a much better performer than Gore, with an old pro's facility for different accents, and -- the odd off night aside -- a feeling for his audience's mood.

And yet -- and here lies the problem -- Blair wishes to appear so sincere, that he sometimes appears embarrassed by the role he is supposed to play. He wants to drop his act of being a regular guy, so we can see that he is really, truly a regular guy. And yet the harder he tries to be sincere, the more he is liable to look insincere.

The steady modern diet of sentimental gush, pop psychology, television and celebrity culture has created a profound confusion. Nobody knows what is theater any more, and what is real. The candidates add to the confusion by denying that they are on a stage, even as they go through their scripted lines. British Conservative opposition leader William Hague says he doesn't "want to be packaged like soap powder". Who is he kidding? Just like Blair, he insists that "everyone knows what I'm really like". But why should we care?

One step out of the confusion is to stop pretending that election campaigns are news. It is humiliating for political reporters to write up staged events, hoping that something will go wrong: one of the actors pulling a punch, or an audience member getting out of line, thinking that audience participation is still de rigueur.

It would be much better for all of us if political journalists would stop following the "campaign trail" and left the job to theatre and movie critics, who are much better able to judge performances. This would restore rhetoric to its proper place. There are good and bad ideas in politics, and there are interests to be defended.

A good politician has the skill to put those ideas across, and defend those interests persuasively. That is the art of politics. Sincerity and character have nothing to do with it, so politicians, as well as hacks, should stop pretending that they do.

-- Guardian News Service