See How They Ran:
The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate
By Gil Troy
The Free Press, 400 pages, $22.95
The Reasoning Voter:
Communication and Persuasion in Presidental Campaigns
By Samuel L. Popkin
University of Chicago Press, 291 pages, $19.95
If the recent past is any guide, grumbling about the wayward electioneering of presidential candidates will begin even before the votes are counted in next month`s New Hampshire primary. The grumblers will lament the defeat of substance by simplicity and long for a return to a politics of serious purpose. Just in time to spare America some anxiety, two new books argue that much of the complaining about campaigns is based on a lack of historical perspective and an incomplete understanding of today`s voters.
In ”See How They Ran,” Gil Troy examines the phenomenon of presidential politics from George Washington to George Bush. Although he chronicles individual campaigns in detail, he is more concerned with showing the larger patterns and paradoxes of seeking the White House.
Troy, an historian at McGill University in Montreal, finds the tension between ”republicanism” and ”liberal democracy” a key contradiction of campaigns since the nation`s early days. The republicans of the late 1700s and early 1800s favored elite rule by men of virtue who stood above and apart from the people, while the democrats of that time sought majority rule and politicians attuned to public opinion. Troy captures the conflict when he says, ”Americans were haunted by the ghosts of George Washington and Andrew Jackson. All candidates had to be as aloof, as virtuous, as restrained as Washington, while being as popular, as political, as dynamic as Jackson.”
Throughout the 19th Century, the reserved manner of republicanism, with its vow of silence for presidential aspirants, was the choice of most Americans. Political parties took responsibility for national campaigns, and partisan newspapers circulated candidates` views. Appealing directly to voters through stump speeches drew crowds, but people departed wondering about undignified, unpresidential behavior.
Troy focuses on two midwestern politicans who challenged the resistance to active campaigning. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois in 1860 and Nebraska`s William Jennings Bryan in 1896 traveled throughout the country, speaking about issues and soliciting support. Both men lost. In the election of 1860, another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, kept his eloquence to himself and won.
What happened during the early years of the 20th Century radically altered the republican approach. Parties were no longer paramount. Individual political personalities, especially Theodore Roosevelt, captured people`s attention, stimulating interest in politicians` public and private lives. Primaries began, making selection of candidates a more open, democratic process. And advertising, the bolder the better, became the preferred way to deliver political messages.
Troy effectively traces the movement from republican restraint to democratic devotion. It`s as though each succeeding campaign compelled candidates to do more traveling, speaking and handshaking. Vestiges of republicanism remained, notably a concern for character and virtue, but the phrase ”running for president” became more literal than metaphorical. Describing Adlai Stevenson`s private distaste for new electoral techniques in 1956, Troy writes: ”Never before had presidential candidates sought out the voters aggressively. . . . Now the candidate was a beggar, stalking voters between lingerie counters in department stores.”
In addition to explaining changes in campaigning over 200 years, Troy also discusses patterns of electoral expectations. Americans have high-minded hopes about politics that keep colliding with nose-holding reality. Campaigns of substance with deliberative public judgment have forever been the nation`s ideal, but it never seems to work out that way. A statement from the New York Evening Post in 1872 is similar to the general sentiment expressed after the presidential race of 1988: ”To elect their own rulers is indeed a great privilege of free citizens. But the principles and methods by which they have come to select them for election are execrable.”
Probing primary sources, Troy shows that ”the golden age of campaigning never quite existed.” This nostalgia for a myth leads to continuing criticism and complaining following campaigns. According to Troy, ”American politics enjoys renewable virginity, a sense each time that this campaign will be different, more honorable, more substantive. Yet, inevitably, the next campaign becomes `the worst ever`. . . .”
Although ”See How They Ran” pays too little attention to the widening gulf between campaigning and governing on the presidential level, the book admirably documents the changes, continuities and contradictions involved in the pursuit of the White House. What the electorate wants and what it receives are complicated matters, made more difficult by the public`s lack of historical memory.
What citizens actually know when they make political decisions is Samuel L. Popkin`s subject in ”The Reasoning Voter.” A rigorous, refreshing rebuttal of conventional thinking, the book argues that Americans take more than echoes of slogans and sound-bites into the voting booth.
Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, draws on his experience as a political consultant and polling analyst for CBS News to make his case. He acknowledges that most voters don`t possess a vast amount of civics knowledge of the textbook variety. But voters do take ”cues” from politicians, interpreting those cues in a continuing process of acceptance and rejection.
Using research in cognitive psychology, economics and sociology as well as data from the CBS News/New York Times survey archive, Popkin constructs a new model for understanding how people vote. Instead of dwelling on civic ignorance or a lack of close public attention to political issues, he concentrates on the relationship between what citizens comprehend from their experience and what thay expect government to do.
”Voting is not a reflexive, mechanistic use of daily-life or media information,” Popkin explains. ”It involves reasoning, the connecting of some information to government performance and other information to specific government policies. People do not reason directly from personal problems to votes; they reason with ideas about governmental performance and
responsibility.”
Popkin supports his theory by analyzing presidential primaries of 1976, 1980 and 1984. In each case, messages from the media (both news reports and ads) made voters aware of their choice of candidates, but those messages weren`t decisive in determining who won or lost, according to Popkin. Larger concerns mattered more.
Popkin shrewdly reveals the realities of the electoral process. But given the current direction of campaigning, one worries about a citizenry that uses what he calls ”low-information rationality” and ”information shortcuts” to make its decisions. The trend in political communication is toward messages that are increasingly compressed, stark and combative in order to slice through the media clutter. Will such ”cues” be sufficient for ”reasoning” to occur in the future?
