Presidential debates say as much about US culture as candidates

American presidential campaigns provide a unique window into our society, according to a University of Michigan anthropologist.

“It says a lot about our culture that we pay so much attention to the clothing, gestures and hair styles of presidential candidates and to their performances in highly theatrical situations, like debates,” said Michael Lempert, a linguistic anthropologist at the U-M.

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“It’s really the ‘TMZ-ization’ of politics,” Lempert said.”We’ve become habituated to this. Basically, we’ve come to rely on the characterizations of candidates that this system has invented to help us make sense of which candidates we should support.”

“As a society, we know that this is happening and that it’s now the norm,” Silverstein said. “But we still feel a certain sense of discomfort that marketing techniques that used to be applied only to commodities are now taken for granted in the packaging of presidential contenders.”

This discomfort is expressed by our calling for rational discussion of the issues and by commentators’ questions about whether the candidates that we’re seeing are “real” or “authentic,” the researchers say.

“Electoral politics has always involved presenting a publicly imaginable character to the electorate,” Lempert said. “But today’s communications technologies and the rise of professional consultancy and political marketing have amplified the race to be real, or to be seen as being real.

“So we not only have debates, but endless debates about the debates. Rather than just being a chance to talk about the issues, the debates are also a form of theater that allows viewers to take the measure of the candidates, through their appearance, their pronunciation, their use of gestures, even their gaffes.”

This explains why George W. Bush, famous for his trouble with language, could be perceived to have done well in the 2004 presidential debate with John Kerry, the researchers say.

“Kerry was, ironically, viewed as being the more patrician, based on his grammar and elocution,” Silverstein said. “And so he seemed like somebody who wasn’t real. When you look at W’s bloopers, they weren’t really bloopers at all. They were deliberate efforts to seem real, like a regular person.”

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