UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2004

Departments

Features

The Future's So Bright

The Prince of Pages

The Changing Face of Beauty

Campaigns: Good for What Ails Us?

Feature

Campaigns: Good for What Ails Us?
Rod Hart '66 makes a case for why we should listen when candidates speak.

–James Burnett




	Rod Hart '66 at seven years old.

ROD HART ’66 CAN STILL remember the precise moment he became hooked on politics, in large part because it landed him in so much trouble with his mother. It was 1952, and Dwight Eisenhower and his motorcade were scheduled to pass Hart’s house during a campaign swing through his hometown of Somerset, Mass. So Hart had decided to make an “I Like Ike” sign, because “I was 7,” he says, “and could spell all the words.” Unfortunately, his mother, a devout Irish Catholic and loyal Democrat, did not share his position on the candidate. While Hart was standing on his front lawn waiting for Eisenhower, she materialized over his shoulder, plucked the sign from his hands, and stormed back inside.

“She never explained why she thought I was wrong, and I never asked,” Hart says. “But in a lot of ways, I’ve spent my career trying to understand how politics can galvanize people in that powerful way.”

In his quest to understand, Hart has shed new light on the political process—and particularly on campaign rhetoric—for the rest of us as well. As a professor at the University of Texas College of Communication, Hart has used an innovative computer program he created to analyze the language featured in every presidential campaign from 1948 to 1996. He reported his findings in 2000, in his provocative book Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good for Us. Recently named interim dean of his department, he has been at work on a new book published this month, Political Keywords: Using the Language That Uses Us, a look at how perceptions of terms like media and government have evolved over time.

During the build-up to the Democratic National Convention in July, UMass Amherst spoke with him about the notable messages emerging from this year’s race, what the public really hears when Bush and Kerry give their stump speeches, and why political ads aren’t as bad as you may think.

UMass: What’s surprised you most about the rhetoric in this year’s presidential contest?
RH: My overall feeling is that nobody really knows what to talk about. The economic signals aren’t consistently clear enough to tell Kerry how far he can push that topic. And circumstances have not allowed the president to play his hole card, which is the war in Iraq. It’s really quite astonishing that a popular president, having had a smashing military victory, is being nibbled to death by ducks on that issue, day in and day out.

UMass: “Nibbled to death by ducks?” I’ve never heard that one before.
RH: Oh, it’s an old expression.

UMass: It sounds like one of those classic Texas aphorisms.
RH: I don’t know where it’s from. “It’s just a little bite here and there, and suddenly it’s all gone.” When you come home every night and assume another death or two of an American soldier will be announced on the news, that really wears on people.

UMass: The situation in Iraq causes problems for Kerry as well.
RH: The old phrase is “politics stops at the water’s edge,” and I think that’s probably still true. Because we are such a polyglot nation, there aren’t a lot of things that inherently tie us together, such as race or ethnicity or region—all those things that make it so much easier to be a Belgian. What we do have, though, is the uniting presence of a common enemy. So you’ve got to be careful when you question the war, because in a sense you’re attacking a source of unity.

UMass: The pundits have a lot of fun with Bush’s and Kerry’s oratorical shortcomings. But how does what the public hears when the candidates speak compare with the cognoscenti’s view?
RH: The thing you have to remember about pundits and people like yourself, writers and reporters, is that they love language. They’re very able interpreters of discourse. When they hear something with a certain nuance, they register it. Ordinary folks don’t listen that way. They don’t listen for language. They’re not policy wonks. But they do listen for position and heart. Is he for this or against this? Is he with me or against me? Then they detect intensity: How important is this to the candidate? What kind of relationship does he want to have with me as a voter?

I think all the jokes about Bush’s malapropisms are lost on most Americans, because most Americans don’t do much better than Bush does when they use ordinary language in their ordinary lives. He’s seen by and large as a fairly straight shooter, and even those who don’t like him kind of know where he is on something.

UMass: That’s partly where the Reagan comparisons come from.
RH: Yeah. Reagan himself wasn’t all that elegant a speaker, for the most part, except on very rare occasions when he had some great speeches written for him.

UMass: Yet he’s remembered as the Great Communicator.
RH: Absolutely. ‘I love this country. Love it with me.’ I mean, that’s not very complicated language.

UMass: Let’s switch gears and talk about Kerry.
RH: He’s a bit more complicated. The basic challenger’s statement is “I don’t like you, and I don’t like the horse you rode in on”—now that’s a Texas expression for you. But Kerry has not yet found out how to make a statement that has that clarity.

I also don’t think Kerry has a very good ear. He’s bright, but I don’t think of him as especially clever or glib—and I mean that in the more positive sense of glib, of being able to reduce a complex idea to a sentence or two. He tends to go on. He’s a bit of a policy wonk. And he doesn’t communicate from the heart especially well.

UMass: Why do you suppose that is?
RH: Well, I’ll say it, because I am one: He’s a New Englander. And you know what that means. It means caution, a sense of propriety. And I also think that a lot of times people are trained to speak from the mind, because somehow that’s a more respectable way to do things. That way, you’re not wallowing in human emotion.

But in a political campaign, people really want to know who you are. Think about Mike Dukakis. When they asked him [during the 1988 presidential campaign] about a hypothetical situation in which his wife had been attacked, he was cold and analytical and detached. Kerry is not nearly that bad. He can generate passion. But his first move is definitely to use the mind more than the heart.

UMass: Another thing he gets hit for is flip-flopping. Even some of his supporters complain that he hasn’t taken any truly daring positions. Are those fair criticisms?
RH: One of the things I reported in Campaign Talk, which we also tracked in 2000, is that, generally speaking, people who run for office have become more and more careful over time. It’s become a much more complicated job to be president of the United States. Our candidates know that every word is being watched. So what you don’t hear in campaigns these days are really bold and imaginative plans. You don’t get unrelenting commitment to fundamental policy positions, as one would have in the forties and fifties, when things were made much clearer. Take any issue that people are debating these days: the environment, international affairs, health care—you can’t talk about any of those responsibly without being very layered and complicated in your responses. And that causes campaigns in some senses to be harder to hear.

UMass: So for Kerry, playing it safe might be a smart move?
RH: Absolutely. The Carter-Reagan analogy is not perfect, but one is reminded of the gas lines, and the fact that we had been humiliated in the Middle East with Iran and the rest. Reagan is now storied, but at the time he was seen as sort of a loose cannon. And people kind of liked Jimmy Carter. But they said, “Hey, this guy is not able to get the job done.” I think this time around, some people may look at the same thing.

UMass: In Campaign Talk you take a pretty optimistic view of campaign ads. Do you still feel that way?
RH: Political ads are extraordinarily effective devices of communication. They communicate at a gut level. They make issues clear with relative emotional precision. And in a lot of ways, they help to set the agenda for our political debate. I think there’s a lot that political ads have going for them that is often misunderstood.

UMass: What about ads that deliberately distort an opponent’s record—don’t those actually corrupt the debate by creating false impressions of the candidates?
RH: Advertising is by definition distorting, because by definition it’s reductive. But I don’t think ads make it impossible to judge the candidates or the issues correctly. We human beings are cognitively efficient. We want to reduce the complexity of the world to something much simpler. It’s our need for simplicity that’s driving this.

UMass: This year, voters will be exposed to more political ads than ever before. Are you worried that, say, eight months of negative spots in Ohio might do long-term damage to how voters view the electoral process?
RH: I don’t think we’re in a great situation with our young people in terms of political involvement and turnout and all the rest. I think they are turned off by the overstatements and the mischaracterizations. Having said that, there is also evidence that, generally speaking, people’s sense of optimism is higher at the end of every presidential campaign than it was before it, because campaigns work to reanimate the democratic impulse. That’s been a pretty consistent finding in polling research over time. It could be just a sense of relief that the damn thing is over. But it may also be a sense of completeness: “Well, the system works. We’ve got a new one—we’ve got the same old one. People have had their say, and now it’s time to move on. The Super Bowl is coming up.” http://communication.utexas.edu/

[top of page]

Campaigns: Good for What Ails Us?

Campaigns: more images

Zack Attack!

Zack Attack!: larger image