Every face tells a story

Ankara, Turkey

I wrote last week from Athens about the media’s – specifically, CNN’s – misguided language, which obfuscated what’s at stake in my homeland’s election. Today, a visit to Ankara University puts me in mind of another, even stronger TV implication for democracies throughout the world: the personalization of politics.

I was talking with Beybin Kejanlioglu, who in addition to teaching media theory in the School of Communications here, does research on television’s role in Turkey’s politics, especially the recent local elections that produced a working majority for the ruling AK (the post-Islamist Justice and Development Party), which is world’s most successful remnant ever to evolve from an Islamist party.

There are many reasons for the AK’s victory but Kejanlioglu believes that its popularity stems significantly from its mastery of television.

To put the matter simply, TV caresses the face. It inflates the individual physiognomy above the party program. The face of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in particular has come to seem not only familiar but also reliable to many more voters than his party’s fundamentalist core.

Of course, the face of the televisual hero would not entrance if the party did not deliver. The AK has many successes to its credit: incorruptible local government (no small thing), economic improvements (within limits), a possible deal in Cyprus (stay tuned).

But given a plausible record, an adroit politician finds in television a way around a petty, corrupt press. Television offers a channel of mobilization, a beacon of identity, a means to certify that the man (or woman) of the hour is the man (or woman) of the people. The politician proves fit to rule by becoming, first, fit to claim attention.

America led the way toward the political of personal image, but many nations have followed: the U.K., Israel, Mexico, Turkey…. And we have not seen the end of the list.

Which brings me back to the ongoing drama of the superpower’s superelection. Under television’s personalizing beam, each contender’s goal is to establish a storyline. He (not yet she) must enunciate a saga of which he is a star, though not so bright a star as to outshine the voter who is, after all, the intended audience. The star must illuminate the audience itself whose attention is the prize for all his strivings. The star must illuminate by incarnation – not in the Christian sense, but as an embodiment of a majority public itself, a suggestion of how it wishes to see itself.

The star must illuminate. The star must successfully appeal to be welcomed into the nation’s home for four more years. The star must also star in a story.

George W. Bush, his own story of masterful stewardship and war presidency springing multiple holes over recent weeks, resorts to a time-honored recourse: he tries to stamp his opponent with a storyline of his own choosing. Thus the Republicans’ declaration that John Kerry is a “tax-and-spend” liberal, a “flip-flopper,” an “international man of mystery” and a known cosmopolitan.

Bush, distracted by unpleasant tidings from critics of his antiterrorist prowess and bad news from Iraq, has had, to date, only a middling success at seizing hold of Kerry’s story and bending it to his use.

But now emerges John Kerry’s dramaturgical problem, which is inescapably a television problem. He must make Bush’s story slide off him like grease while substituting his own script. So far, he’s been both lucky and rather adroit. Bush’s storyline for Kerry keeps running into interference. One week, economic travails hit Bush, drag down his reputation, and Kerry cleverly positions Bush as the king of budget deficits. The next, Richard Clarke’s fierce but careful assault on Bush’s anti-terrorist prowess rocks him on his heels. Clarke neutralized Bush at his strong point.

The headlines continue to offer no help to Bush. Consider the New York Times’ 4 April “Uneven Response Seen on Terror in Summer of 2001,” which included these lines:

“The warnings during the summer were more dire and more specific than generally recognized. Descriptions of the threat were communicated repeatedly to the highest levels within the White House. “In more than 40 briefings, Bush was told by George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, of threats involving Al Qaeda.”

But the time is approaching when Kerry must go beyond necessary criticism to a performance that embodies his positive virtues. In 2000, if you count electoral votes, Bush was able to do this to Al Gore. With frat-boy jokes, Bush the blueblood cast himself as the people’s red-blooded champion. Equivalently, Kerry needs to present a winning face.

As a character, Kerry’s strong suit – on camera and perhaps off – is manly solidarity. However ungainly he appears at times, put him among veterans and he’s infused with an unmistakable spirit of love and battle.

There are film clips of Bush at New York’s Ground Zero on 14 September 2001 with his arm around a firefighter and a bullhorn to his lips, as in his prep school days as a master cheerleader (I owe this point to Joe Cutbirth, former press secretary to Gov. Ann Richards of Texas). But these photo ops are outdone by shots of Lt. Kerry fresh from his naval battles in Vietnam and now reunited with veterans. Bush may talk about teamwork, but on TV, whenever surrounded by his entourage of old pals, Kerry personifies it.

Throughout his career, if that is the right word, Bush has rallied his college buddies, men who’ve shared with him the fun and games of fraternity life, of oil investments with other people’s money and baseball investments with ditto. Kerry rallies the men with whom he’s shared combat, several of them lifelong Republicans.

But Kerry cannot afford to keep his story line wrapped around his heroic past. He’s got to find some visual equivalent of himself as future commander.

It’s doable, but hardly automatic. The camera doesn’t love Kerry’s long bones or his sometimes weary-wary eyes. His sobriety invites the ennui of pundits. But the curious thing about charisma is that it’s not predictable. All charisma is singular. It refers to unique gifts, gifts that might not even have been identified as gifts at all until the uniquely but strangely – unprecedentedly – gifted figure arrived at his or her moment.

Bush’s fake populism comes with a story: aristocratic scion overcomes drunkenness, gets himself born again, lands on his feet, buddies his way to power, gets reborn again in the caldron of 11 September.

Kerry, with his own bluish blood, his own Skull & Bones membership at Yale, married stupendous wealth and skis the Idaho mountains. But none of this rules him out as a compelling personal figure. His mission, I think, is to go the FDR route even without the man’s supreme charm.

What Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated is that it’s not bad to wave an aristocratic wand in America if you can lay it at the feet of the populace. Noblesse oblige, combined with wit and looks, worked for John Kennedy. In the squeaker race of 1960, Kennedy toughed it out – in part, through trickery over the “missile gap” and Cuba – by making Nixon, the professional cold warrior, look weak. Kerry can tough it out by making Bush look weak.