The campaign gets underway. The first denials and apologies and yecchy overheard jokes and cavalier rearrangements of reality occur. They are analyzed to death; the analysis stops, and we all await the next load of small-to medium-size embarrassments. The politicians will surely oblige us and deliver them on schedule. We will all cluck-cluck. This will be our national life for the next 12 months. The heart sinks.
What would it take to change our now predictable electoral process, that unavailing series of carefully monitored and deeply uninteresting pratfalls the candidates take right out there before our very eyes? The candidates will say: a different press, a serious press, one that isn’t forever harping on our minor shortcomings and trying to trap us or show us up, one that cares about the issues. They have a point. But I say serious candidates must come first, candidates I define quite simply as those who are willing to be themselves and take responsibility for themselves and quit pretending to be something other than normal or even human. From that a different press would almost have to follow. Gotcha journalismcat-and-mouse coverage and, finally, whole cat-and-mouse campaigns-is inevitable so long as the candidates indulge in so many systematic deceptions and conceits and pretensions to the most boring and improbable kind of perfection.
It is by now a tired old truism that most politicians who get in trouble get in trouble because of the way they react to trouble they’re already in. They make it infinitely worse by lying or faking amnesia or blaming someone else or blowing up or breaking down or otherwise flapping in a manner that is not only unbecoming but pretty unreassuring in one who aspires to lead. To this has also been added the excessively self-abasing, even prostrating apology (some thought Bob Kerrey had come to this in his reaction to being caught by an open mike telling a gross and politically embarrassing story Such apologies are not to be confused with the more familiar and equally unauthentic Checkers kind: the “so-called” or unrepentant apology that frequently manages the astonishing feat of being more disgusting than the original offense. What is wrong with the newer self-flagellating kind is that in its extravagant protestations of shame and confessions of wrongdoing it postulates an unrealistic, goody-goody kind of person who cannot believe he ever would have done a thing like that. Like what? Like, say, telling a dirty joke.
Oh, come on, fellas. Chaucer told dirty jokes in books that college kids are (or at least used to be) expected to read. Check out “The Miller’s Tale.” You don’t need to go out of your way to revolt people or to disparage particular groups, but it is possible to say “I’m sorry” without managing to imply that you are the kind of person who never has and never would have done such a thing, except that you must have been seized by some diabolical kind of temporary insanity. It is that which is unconvincing and which contributes to the widespread suspicion with which politicians are viewed.
Our whole political culture contributes to this. People in public life have been working at it so long that they are by now expected to come on as error-free, temptation-proof paragons such as never did exist. They comply with the expectation by pretending to talk and think in lifeless pieties at all times and shield their genuine, flawed, true (and much more attractive) selves from public sight; they either refuse to concede error or misbehavior or admit it with so much abjection and gloom as to suggest that it was a monstrous aberration, as distinct from a commonplace small sin. They don’t sin. They don’t err. They don’t even change their minds. Again and again public people will go through the most dreadful contortions to prove that they didn’t say what we all heard them say or that they never held two inconsistent thoughts or did anything from other than disinterested, godlike motives.
Related to this and-I am convinced of it-to the disfavor in which so many political people are held is their incorrigible wish not just to be above reproach but also to be everything they are not. They pretend to be super people who encompass all the virtues known in human nature, not just a few of them, and all the generally admired characteristics ever heard of, not just those that truly and aptly go together in their particular personal makeup. Thus the acquired or transformed persona, rarely plausible to those it is meant to impress, even a little sad in the contemplation-Dukakis with his helmeted head sticking out of that tank, George Bush talking in pseudo-roughneck language.
Consider the best known open-mike story ever told, the apparently apocryphal one about the kids’ radio-program host called “Uncle Don” who held forth in the ’30s and ’40s, and talked in the predietable patronizing, false tones reserved for children. In that legendary unguarded moment when he thought the program was off the air, he was supposed to have uttered his immortal: “I guess that’ll hold the little bastards.” Stipulate the two Uncle Dons. Which would you think the real one? Which could you identify with and understand? Which would you actually prefer? And, finally, why do so many politicians answer all of the above questions wrong and come on like the unctuous Uncle Don?
The point is not that Bob Kerrey, for instance, became lovable by telling that awful joke or that politicians who are found to have been less than perfect in their marital fidelity, say, are better people for that or that those who have made stupid statements in the past should be admired for them. The point is that by merely occasionally conceding humanity-from error to weakness to dopiness to bad taste to a change of heart or whatever-they become believable. They remind us of real people. They seem not to be faking. They seem to be unafraid to come to us as they are. They seem much more honest with themselves and therefore more trustworthy as prospective holders of high office.
Self-confidence of the kind that makes it possible for a politician to own up to what he is and take responsibility for his own behavior is an awesome, even invincible, political asset. I realize that we in the press have been known all too often to clop people for truth-telling, too, to say “Gosh, what a jerk-he said he was brainwashed,” for instance, to penalize candor and admission of wrongdoing. But I think the risk for the straightforward politician is far smaller and the reward far greater. You can’t deflate the uninflated. You can’t catch a guy in a falsehood who’s telling the truth. Why are so many politicians unwilling or unable to achieve true pitch?
