As Mitt Romney, John Kerry and Al Gore can attest — and not in a good way — being, or at least seeming, like an average Joe is critically important to your chances of winning.Except...well, you know what Romney, Kerry, and Gore have in common? They won major party nominations! And that's where things such as candidate personality are actually important. As...George H.W. Bush can attest.
Or maybe Cillizza would say that Michael Dukakis failed "average Joe" too. But then...well, Bob Dole was no average Joe, and neither was John McCain. And you know who else was no average Joe? Ronald Reagan. Maybe there's a movie star exception.
Does Barack Obama seem like an average Joe? Republicans don't think so...I don't know. But even spotting him the last three presidents, for whatever that's worth, he's still not getting there. Far more nominees fail that test than pass it, and before the Clinton/W/Obama group, I'm not sure when the previous average Joe showed up. Truman, I suppose. Surely not FDR, and he seemed to be just fine as a presidential candidate.
For that matter, thinking about FDR, or McCain, or Reagan, or perhaps Obama, reminds us that in fact "average Joe" is only one of a number of politician personalities that can work just fine. That's part of what Richard Fenno talks about in Home Style -- part of a politician's promises have to do with the type of person he or she will be, personality included, but there are a wide variety of choices. What's important isn't picking the right one; what's important is acting, after the election, how one "promised" to act.
In other words...it's just another one of those things that some political reporters and pundits are used to saying, but five seconds of thinking about it reveals that it's pretty much nonsense.
Also Gore won the most votes from voters nationwide although he lost in the most important swing state: the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteI think we should coin a new term, the Gore Fallacy, for whenever a pundit makes a generalization about defeated presidential candidates using Al Gore as one of the examples.
DeleteNote my recent post on "Patterns," where I made the point that any presidential election pattern which would be ruined if you code Gore/Bush the other way...is probably not a pattern to pay any attention to.
DeleteI had that post specifically in mind, but it's something I've noticed for a while now.
DeleteThe real point about the weakness of Gore as a candidate is that, given the peace and prosperity America enjoyed in 2000, it shouldn't even have been all that close. Hence, pointing to Gore's popular vote plurality (48.4-47.9) or to how Nader hurt Gore or arguing whether Gore "really" carried Florida somewhat misses the point in answering arguments that he was a bad candidate.
ReplyDeleteWhile that's a valid point, from what I've seen it's used heavily as a rationalization for the habit so many pundits have of retroactively assessing a candidate based on whether they won or lost. When's the last time a candidate who made it to the White House was commonly described as a bad candidate? Or a losing candidate described as a good one? The fact is that practically the only time we ever hear the argument "he didn't do as well as he should have" is in discussions about Gore in 2000, and it's mostly just a post hoc way of dealing with the fact that he got stamped with the "loser" image purely because he didn't end up in the White House, regardless of how accurately or not it reflected the will of the voters.
DeleteI agree that a lot of candidates have "underperformed" and yet it is not sufficiently noticed, simply because they won. In 1960, given that the Democrats were easily the majority party (Ike's popularity was personal, not partisan) and that the country was in a recession (admittedly a mild one) I think JFK should have won more convincingly (this is one reason I think his religion was a net minus, not a plus). There is a story that after the election, someone told Bobby Kennedy, "You're a genius!" and Bobby replied, "Change 60,000 votes and I'm a bum."
DeleteThere are, of course, those who argue that Obama underperformed due to his race. But the issue I've been raising concerns assessment of a candidate's skills: those who win are immediately seen as skillful candidates, those who lose as inept. The Gore example, to me, has long been a sort of ultimate reductio ad absurdum to this line of thinking. Even people who know perfectly well he got more votes than his opponent still think of him as a loser, which in turns leads them to think of him as a poor candidate. As soon as you bring up his popular-vote lead or the questionable results in Florida, only then do they fall back on the argument, "Well, he did worse than he should have"--something you almost never hear applied to other elections, including 1960. In fact, the conventional lesson we always hear about 1960 is that JFK won because of his superior telegenic qualities.
Delete(Great quote, by the way.)
Cilizza is surely wrong that appearing to be an "Average Joe" is "critically important to your chances of winning." But it's not nothing!
ReplyDeletePut it this way: It's not that non-Average-Joes can't win; it's that they are more likely to lose to Average Joes.
In five of the last six presidential elections, the more "Average-Joe-y" candidate won. (As to the sixth one, I consider Obama and McCain to be about equal in their Average-Joe-iness.) So there's that.
There are a lot of personalities that a politician can choose from, true, but the home-spun, down-to-earth Average Joe is a tried and tested winner.
Like "Charisma," "average joe"-ism is retroactively assigned to winners and detracted from losers.
ReplyDeleteWhich is to say, it's like Dana Milbank's columns about the "good" John McCain.
Like "Charisma," "average joe"-ism is retroactively assigned to winners and detracted from losers.
DeleteExactly.
But Cillizza isn't proclaiming it retroactively. It's an observation and hedged prediction.
DeleteHaving pointed that out, I agree that Cillizza is overplaying this.
This is of a piece with other liberals--particularly the Acela press corps--who want to like Christie as a tough Daddy (in Maureen Dowd's pungent Freudian parlance) and give some justification for the warmth they feel for a reactionary toad.
DeleteThis not only overplays a non-existent quality, it underlines an actual fact of the post-war presidency: more than other time, it validates egomania and sociopathy, not "averageness."
The only thing that this highlights is that Cillizza has read Theodore White but not Richard Ben Cramer, or even Roger Ailes: that "Average Joe"-ism, a proxy for "have a beer with" is a marketing trick that fails to predict governing skill just as much as it might predict it.
There haven't been any "average Joe" presidents in my lifetime -- and that includes Southern Rhodes scholar "bubba" Clinton. I know that George W. Bush was voted by the media as the former-alcoholic cut up they'd most like to "have a beer with," but I never thought that was because he was an "average Joe" (although he is, perhaps, an average intellect). I thought it was because the media's self-described "meritocrats" really love the idea of rubbing elbows with, and sucking up to, the country's true, dynastic elite.
ReplyDeleteThe media's love of ascribing "average joe-ness" as a crucial quality in a politician is also a backdoor way of making the male voter and male politician the default most important representative of the nation. (It's less explicit, but I'd also say that the image of joe-ness that the media often has in mind is also coded as white, so it's also an implicit ethnic preference.)
ReplyDeleteDovetails with their disproportionate preoccupation with the white working class.
DeleteUgh hear hear. it's so easy to sneak in normative judgments under nominally neutral descriptors that a lot of people probably don't even notice that they're defining women, non-whites, (most?) big city-dwellers, non-Christians, people perceived as too Christian, &c., out of the average, i.e., out of the Real America.
DeleteI bet even fewer of them notice that they're not defining the very rich out of the average.
Does "average Joe" mean "not too smart?" Or "does not appear to be too much smarter than me" that it makes me uncomfortable. That's how I understand it.
ReplyDeleteSome candidates win by virtue of seeming smart--FDR, JFK, Obama. But for others, the perception is a liability. Along these lines?
There's another, related, point, and that has to do with race. I suspect that Obama benefited from appearing intelligent because many white Americans find it easier to deal with a black intellectual than a black "average Joe."
DeleteI actually had this thought the first time I saw Obama speak, at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His speech immediately followed (or was immediately followed by--I can't remember) Howard Dean's, and I noticed that Dean used contractions a lot more than Obama did. It occurred to me that Dean, as a white politician, had more to gain from sounding informal, whereas Obama had more to gain from sounding more polished.
I think you are missing the more obvious explanation: that Obama is the good twin, and Dean the evil one.
Delete@JB: thank you. it turns out that after a long day of reading Virgil with recalcitrant students (which isn't done yet, but at least I get to sit down for this part), a "Star Trek" joke is exactly what I needed ... actually I am not sure I even care about the joke: just being reminded of childlike androids and their tweeny brothers is enough to make me smile.
Deleteum, unless this is some more general rule of good twin-bad twin fiction? -- in which case, I feel kind of lame that "Star Trek" is what immediately came to mind ......
Always happy to cheep people up when they need it!
DeleteAnd yeah, as far as I know Data and Lor are the only ones who are distinguished by ability to use contractions.
I'm very frustrated right now because the youngest daughter hasn't watched the Picard show yet; we're still on the final season of the Kirk show, which I enjoy tremendously, but we've been moving slowly through it forever -- and she likes being systematic, so we're not going to skip ahead. She likes it, but is often in the mood for something else.
On the good side, since she's about to enter high school, we just started Buffy. Which is, of course, really fun.
(OK, the sad part is what we also this summer finally finished Buffy season 7 with the oldest daughter, just after her first year of college. Major slow-down after season three, and tough slog getting through season six...).
Uh, sorry for the long diversion everyone.
we've been moving slowly through it forever -- and she likes being systematic, so we're not going to skip ahead. She likes it, but is often in the mood for something else
Deleteha, yeah that's me in re: TNG. My husband watched it as a kid, starting rewatching at random, I made him start again from the beginning with me, and after two years we're ... most of the way through season four. In some ways TNG is quite disappointing. For one, though I haven't watched that much of it TOS seems largely to belong to the "thought experiment" tradition of science fiction, and I had expected TNG to, but no. For another, they're constantly discussing top-level social organization, but without depth or detail. The most I've learned about how the Federation works at home came from when there were rumors of strange doings among top brass and then it turned out everyone had been taken over by those bugs that made them super-strong; other than that I have no sense of the hierarchy, how people are assigned specific tasks or how those tasks are divided, how representative Federation government is -- it appears to be quite centralized, but is that just for general organizing principles, and they don't engage with details because everything else is done locally? And that sort of thing. It all seems very French, or maybe just European more generally, with Star Fleet Academy functioning like ENA or X as an exam-based admission ticket for the very, very few into the political and cultural elites, which run things through centralized control and a massive class of career civil servants and a minimum of unseemly scuffling over politics. (Yes, it's just a show and I should really just relax, but -- I'm not trying to catch them out in errors; I'm specifying issues they bring up that I wish they would engage with.)
I'm not really sorry for the long digression, everyone. 'Cause just don't read it then, right?
I've never watched "Buffy" because it seemed too scary.
Agreed about TOS and thought experiments, and also that IMHO the best TNG episodes are those that hark back to this tradition. Overall, my simple heuristic is this: TNG is like high school in space. In fact, a remarkable number of series are basically high school in some other setting: Abby McBeal was high school in a law firm, for instance. (And I guess Buffy is high school in high school? I'm not a viewer.) I'm talking here about what issues preoccupy the characters, especially in their off-hours: who's got a crush on whom, who's going steady with whom, who's got problems with mom or dad or a sibling, etc. Also, how relatively foregrounded those off-hours are (much more in TNG than in TOS, I think, although I wonder if any fangeek out there has ever quantified this.)
DeleteThis is not a criticism, incidentally -- different strokes, and all -- although like any other narrative tendency or gimmick, it can get out of hand in a long series and become too dully predictable.
I always assumed it was spelled Lore (as in Folklore, the opposite of Data).
Delete@SM: it is! when the episode title "Datalore" flashed across my screen I thought "oh amazing we're going to get far-distant past stories about Data." and so we did, I suppose. I really like the stark antithesis you put forward (previously only hazing formulated in my mind), because the episode is about how Data's identity is as much a product of his life history as anyone else's, even though Data himself denies that his identity is any way narratively constructed -- or, in other words, the episode is about how Data has defined lore out of his life, but it keeps coming back to haunt him with its unnerving creative flexibility. And ditto ditto for Lore.
Delete@Jeff: maybe that's why "Freaks and Geeks" is so hard for people to watch: they want alt universe high school fic, not what high school was really like.
The TOS movies have more of the high school feel, too, don't they? Battles between cliques with distinct "look"s (for instance Khan et al. dress like a hair band), awkward appearances of ex-lovers, field trips (to the aquarium! in twentieth-century San Francisco), but mostly because Kirk and Spock spend so much more time in the movies than in the show declaring themselves bff and talking about how much their lives would suck without each other.
Man, you know what was a terrible idea? The Borg Queen. Now the Borg, there's a neat thought experiment about the organizational structure of society for you. Why would you ruin that? (just to have a scene of some freaky lady hitting on Data? 'cause that happens all the time anyway.)
Oh, and back to @JB: Data's daughter also uses contractions ..... not sure how that meshes with the Howard Dean analogy.
Wait a sec -- neither of you have watched Buffy? Really?
DeleteStrongly, strongly recommend it. It's very unlikely it's too scary; I'm not a horror fan at all, and my wife is horror-averse, and neither of us find it a problem.
The truly great seasons are 2 and 3 -- you can pretty much get away with watching only a few season one episodes, and skip a little later, and quit after season three...but I'd be very surprised if you don't enjoy it.
On Next Generation...agree with Jeff. I guess what I'd say is that both shows work best when they plop our heroes into a basic science fiction story that could work with any characters, but it's especially fun to navigate them with our friends. Almost all the soap opera stuff on TNG annoys me...well, mostly, it's the romances that annoy me. The one-dimensional romances on the Kirk show work way better, IMO, than the two-dimensional ones on TNG.
DeleteDS9 doesn't have (for the most part) the excellent stand-alone science fiction plots that the first two shows had, but the long-term plots, including the romances, are far superior. And there's a lot more politics in it, although it surely doesn't address all the questions we have about the Federation, Starfleet, etc.
The one-dimensional romances on the Kirk show work way better, IMO, than the two-dimensional ones on TNG.
DeleteRight, well put.
As to Buffy, I have no excuse, other than the usual: Vita brevis, ars longa. But OK, noted, thanks for specifying the best seasons.
@classicist: The TOS movies have more of the high school feel, too, don't they?
DeleteWell, most of them come from (roughly) the same era as TNG, so some similarities are probably to be expected. It does help, though, that they're movies, which means there's less time to fill -- the central adventure can take up most of "episode." Also that the characters heading into late middle age, and this fact is "thematized," as the lit-crit crowd would say. One thing I dislike about the new movie franchise is that it's really trying hard to high-school-ize things again, even more so than TNG. The characters even look 17. But, as we know, blockbuster films these days are mostly made for that demographic.
@Jeff -- I don't know what "thematized" means! you forget that humanities people don't think philosophers belong to them ... other than that, good points.
DeleteMy better angels are warning me that this thread has gotten way too cool to drag it back to the open, but I never listen to those better angels anyway, so here goes...maybe when Cillizza says "Average Joe" he means "Not presenting outside-the-norm equities that are easy for the media to pick on".
ReplyDeleteIn the hyper-partisan media era, we have:
Bush 41: a supermarket scanner
Dukakis: an Abrams tank
Clinton: the astroturf in the El Camino
Gore: the lockbox
Bush 43: the constant smirk
Kerry: duck-huntin' in his jeans
McCain: Palin
Romney: NASCAR (owner) friends
All of these are instances of politicians attempting to put themselves in a particular frame, missing badly, and the opportunistic media making hay with those errors. Didn't matter to the elections, I guess, but probably sold a lot of copy. The point being that "average" (per se) should not be the politician's goal, but rather the goal should be the outcome average people achieve (not being plucked out of their frame for ridicule).
Actually, Kerry is particularly interesting in this respect. He took heat probably more than any other on that rogue's gallery from the Swift Boaters. His transgression, I guess, is that his medals over in Vietnam were not earned in circumstances meriting their awarding. Sounds pretty...average, no?
Pretty clearly, Kerry took heat not because he wasn't "average" enough (he was quite that!) but rather because he tried to contrast his own commander-in-chief bona fides with the other guy's, tried to adopt a frame that was more than average, and it was his averageness (or poor fit for that frame) that helped write all that Swift Boat copy.
If that made sense. If it didn't, who cares, go back to the Star Trek stuff, that's more interesting anyway.
Oh, by all means. It's actually been a very interesting discussion other than where I hijacked it.
DeleteAn obvious point, but as no one has made it yet:
ReplyDeleteIf an "average Joe" was really what the voters actually want, wouldn't we have now President Biden and Vice-President Obama?
Jon,
ReplyDeleteI'll watch Buffy when you watch Barney Miller. Deal?
Hey, I've watched a fair amount of Barney Miller. I really don't remember how much, but surely at least a dozen episodes, could very well be more.
DeleteAnd I don't hate it...it's just not really one of my shows. But I have given it a chance, and I'm sure I'll watch it again sometime.
Sorry, I couldn't resist...
Delete