Table 1. Comparative analysis of debate format and type of moderator intervention
MODERATOR (to Bush): Your folks are saying some awful things.
BUSH: I hope they’re not awful things. I think they may be using the man’s own words.
MODERATOR: Well, I mean calling him a serial exaggerator…
BUSH: I don’t believe I’ve used those words.
MODERATOR: No, but your campaign ads.
BUSH: Maybe they have.
MODERATOR: And your campaign officials have. And your campaign officials, Mr. Vice President, are now calling the governor a bumbler.
8Thus from whistle-blowing to value judgements via the active roles of decision-maker and negotiator, the moderator must master the art of mediating the boundaries that separate the impartial referee from subjective defender of the American people while maintaining his image of the astute, well-informed newsman. As a final note here one can find it a contradiction in terms that so much attention is paid to following rules and delegating precise times of response and rebuttal in a country where political opinion is shaped on the one hand by 45-second campaign ads in which anything goes in terms of accusations or name-calling, and on the other hand by the ritual sound bites of the nightly news through which the media controls what most voters will hear and remember about the candidates.
- 1 A more recent form of campaigning is that of the candidate website used extensively for the first (...)
9Such considerations concerning how political opinion is actually shaped in the U.S. Presidential elections brings us to the second part of this paper which will now deal with the central figures of the debates –the Presidential candidates– and how they negotiate the mediation of their televisual image within the fluctuating conditions imposed by three different debate formats. First of all it, is important to remember how low voter participation in American Presidential elections can be, and the fact that many people vote along party lines, even though this tendency would appear to be on the decline in recent elections. Most Americans derive their opinions of the candidates from watching television1 —not only from the debates, or the specialized news programs, but also (and primarily) from two specific forms of campaign coverage that reduce the essence of each candidate into small, digestible pieces: the “sound bites” of the day, and political commercials. Most frequent in the heat of the Presidential race between September and election day in November, sound bites are utterances which may vary in length from a few words to a full sentence or two contained in a candidate’s speech or interview of the day, selected by the press and reused in the nightly report on the progression of each candidate’s campaign, his reactions to remarks by his opponent’s camp and so on. It is important to know here that the candidates are not the poor innocent victims of this system; they know the rules of the game and play accordingly, by including in their daily discourse catch phrases that are likely to be selected as sound bites by the media.
10Where do these catchy phrases come from? Basically from campaign commercials, which constitute the form of American political discourse most used by the candidates and most widely-received by American voters. Whereas the “hottest” televized debate will only be viewed by about 90 million people as noted at the beginning of this paper, a 45-second campaign spot broadcast during the commercial break of a prime time sit-com or football game will be viewed by twice that many potential voters. A dozen showings of that same spot will invariably have far more impact on a viewer than a 90-minute debate, not to mention the fact that seeing the commercial is not a voluntary act, while tuning into a debate is. In fact, campaign ads “because of their brevity and unpredictable (by the viewer’s standards) scheduling, are equally likely to be seen by opponents, supporters and neutrals whereas people who are disinterested in politics, or unfavorable to one candidate, will avoid a scheduled program.” (Comstock 1989: 127)
11The candidate is thus faced with a challenge in the debate: how will he attract voter attention and promote a specific image that has been carefully built –and at great expense– through TV ads? The answer, of course, is by embedding “sound bite-able” phrases and actual slogans from ads in the answers given to the moderator’s questions while sounding natural. This may appear a daunting task, but in fact is quite easy for the experienced politician. Although candidates do not know what questions will be asked by the moderator, the themes of the questions are predictable, since the issues of the campaign are the object of daily news coverage and opinion (or “tracking”) polls. In addition, when the debates take place the candidates have been making speeches for months –during the primaries, at the national Conventions and in the fall campaign. The candidates in fact will respond to questions in ways that have already worked well, thanks to their accumulated experience in speech making, press conferences and debate rehearsals. (Caffee & Dennis 1979: 78) If we look for surface evidence of the correlation between the predictability of being asked about certain issues and the occurrence of catch phrases in the candidates’ responses, we can observe the following: in debates 1 and 3, recurrent catch phrases dealing with domestic issues such as education, taxes or health care reform occur in almost every answer to a question, even though the formats of these two debates are diametrically opposed. In the informal debate, however, there are no catch phrases whatsoever, partly because the format is “conversational” rather than the formal response/rebuttal style, but also because the questions are related to less discussed topics such as foreign policy, American military intervention abroad, special rights for gays and protection of the environment.
Table 2. Recurrent catch phrases used by candidates during the debates (both positive and negative)
|
Campaign theme
|
Al Gore
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George W. Bush
|
|
Economy
|
Will we be better off four years from now than we are today?
|
|
|
Education
|
|
An education system that leaves no child behind
|
|
Health care and social security
|
Keep Medicare in a lockbox
Keep Social Security in an iron lockbox
|
It’s Medi-scare
|
|
Government and governing capacities
|
|
I want to empower the people
I trust the people, I don’t trust the federal government
It’s who you trust, the government or the people
Working across the partisan divide
(10 times)
|
|
Ability to lead as
the future commander-in-chief
|
I served my country in Vietnam (3 times)
|
To rebuild the military
Flanked by Colin Powell and General Norman Schwartzkopf
|
|
Taxes
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Tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% (12 times)
|
Give money back to the people who pay the bills
The hard-working people of America’s money
|
|
Character issues
|
We ought to attack our country’s problems, not each other
|
They’ve moved that sign “The buck stops here” from the Oval Office desk to “The buck stops here” on the Lincoln bedroom.
|
|
Abortion
|
A woman’s right to choose
|
To promote the culture of life/to promote the value of life
|
12Table 2 shows the most pertinent examples of these catch phrases and the campaign issues that they address. This is not an exhaustive list from the debates, but the phrases listed are significant indicators of how American political discourse in a campaign situation belongs to a vaster network of intertextual reference. In particular, what can be seen in Table 2 are two phenomena. First, we can note the most frequent catch phrase used by each candidate and which denotes what could be called that candidate’s pet subject and/or the leitmotif of his campaign. For Al Gore the phrase is “tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%” (of American taxpayers, he means), which he uses each time he wants to attack George W. Bush’s tax plan. This specific phrase is used twelve different times, including three times in one two-minute response to a question on the subject. Besides being a phrase taken directly from a negative ad broadcast on national television, this phrase also recalls Clinton’s negative ad campaign against George Bush (senior) in 1992 and which helped him win the election. Although this networking of political ad phrases and slogans may seem strange, even improbable, to French voters who are not exposed to this type of campaigning, an American voter has been exposed dozens of times to these ads every time he or she watches television, and American TV culture is such that the voter understands this reference to another Presidential election and will associate it —consciously or unconsciously— with the outcome of that election. As for George W. Bush, the preferential phrase is “working across the partisan divide” or a variation on this theme such as “I’ve been working with both Republicans and Democrats”, used ten times and in responses to various questions to promote his image as a “uniter, not a divider” (another catch phrase variation of this leitmotif). Again, the American voter recognizes in these chosen expressions the profile of the challenger and of the candidate with no previous experience in federal government, like Bill Clinton in 1992 or Jimmy Carter in 1976 for whom the highest office held before becoming President was governor. Such candidates systematically attack the federal government and pose as the champions of government for the people, by the people as declared in the Constitution, while the opponent, in most cases the sitting President or the current Vice President, must attack the challenger on the basis of his inexperience in the handling of national and international issues.
13The second phenomenon is the occurrence of the two phrases “Will we be better off four years from now than we are today?” (spoken by Gore) and “It’s who you trust, the government or the people” (spoken by Bush). These are campaign ad slogans, not of the 2000 elections but of the 1988 and 1992 elections. The phrase used by Gore was in fact first pronounced by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 debate against President Carter (Shapiro 1992: 19) but was used by George Bush senior in a 1988 spot in which he says “If you elect me President, you will be better off four years from now than you are today”; this same phrase –and the passage from the 1988 Bush ad– were used against Bush by Clinton in a negative ad during the 1992 race. George W.’s phrase, on the other hand, was used by Clinton in many ads and speeches of his 1992 campaign when Clinton (like George W. in 2000) was the governor of a Southern state with no connections in Washington, promising to beat big government and “empower the people” –another catch phrase used by George W. in 2000. Thus these phrases can be situated in a larger network of candidate name-recognition strategies, with their effectiveness mainly based on the listener’s skill at recognizing them and reconnecting them to the context of other Presidential races and their respective outcomes. It must not be forgotten that this act of recognition functions as a form of adherence to what is being said, in the same way that humor, double entendre and other linguistic artifices of advertizing are used to elicit the listener’s approbation.
14The candidates also use other forms of linguistic mediation in the building of their public image: one such technique is to add the occasional personal note to show that they are ordinary, God-fearing Americans. One of the most obvious forms of personalization is mentioning the family in endearing ways, or sometimes even to serve the purpose of self-ridicule; in sociolinguistic terms, such personalization of the message is a strategy for increasing audience involvement. (Gumpertz 1982: 195) Two striking examples of these two ploys in the 2000 debates are as follows: in the first debate, Al Gore announced “Tipper and I have four children, and God bless them, every one of them decided on their own to come here this evening”; in the third debate, Bush declared “When I campaigned [in the race for the governorship of Texas], a lot of folks didn't think I could win including, by the way, my mother”. Such remarks may well serve another objective as well, that of making the public laugh, since laughter constitutes a mediating factor which bridges the gap between the politician and the voter he is attempting to woo. This is of particular interest in the debates where the occasional piece of wit gives comic relief from the formal environment and rhetoric.
15Last but not least, as language is a central mediating element in the construction of his public image, each candidate must master a wide range of linguistic registers going from standard language to dialect. According to sociolinguist Sylvie Moosmuller
The use of standard language variants is most often associated with intelligence, competence and status-related traits, whereas dialect language variants are generally associated with sociability, social attractiveness and trustworthiness. This implies that a ‘flexible’ language use, ranging from standard to dialect, should be part of the politician’s repertoire, if he/she wants to address as many groups of electors as possible. (1989: 141)
16Such ranges of speech variants can be remarked in the closing remarks made by the two Presidential candidates at the end of the third debate and which we have reproduced below.
GORE: Thank you very much, Jim, and I'll begin by answering your questions –your last question. I believe that a lot of people are skeptical about people in politics today because we have seen a time of great challenge for our country. Since the assassination of our best leaders in the '60's, since the Vietnam War, since Watergate, and because we need campaign finance reform. (1)
I would like to tell you something about me. I keep my word. I have kept the faith. I have kept the faith with my country. I volunteered for the Army. I served in Vietnam. I kept the faith with my family. Tipper and I have been married for 30 years. We have devoted ourselves to our children and now our nearly one-and-a-half-year-old grandson. I have kept the faith with our country. Nine times I have raised my hand to take an oath to the Constitution, and I have never violated that oath. I have not spent the last quarter century in pursuit of personal wealth. I have spent the last quarter century fighting for middle-class working men and women in the United States of America. I believe very deeply that you have to be willing to stand up and fight no matter what powerful forces might be on the other side. (2)
If you want somebody who is willing to fight for you, I am asking for your support and your vote and, yes, your confidence and your willingness to believe that we can do the right thing in America, and be the better for it. We've made some progress during the last eight years. We have seen the strongest economy in the history of the United States. (3)
Lower crime rates for eight years in a row. Highest private home ownership ever, but I'll make you one promise here. You ain't seen nothing yet. And I will keep that promise. (4)
17For the purposes of our demonstration, Gore’s closing statement has been divided into four “movements” in which language production moves progressively from the standard variant of the well-educated and knowledgeable statesman making reference to history and to the importance of the political issues at stake (1), to a more personalized form of expression in (2) and (3), as the sentences become shorter and less complex when he evokes his life as a husband, father and citizen. Finally in the last movement (4) we can note the use of elliptical phrases and then the surprisingly substandard “You ain't seen nothing yet” to illustrate his closeness to the middle-class Americans he has promised to defend throughout the campaign.
We have also divided George W.'s closing statement into four similar movements:
BUSH: Well, Jim, I want to thank you and thank the folks here at Washington University and the vice president. Appreciate the chance to have a good, honest dialogue about our differences of opinion. (1)
I think after three debates the good people of this country understand there is a difference of opinion. There is a difference between big federal government and somebody who is coming from outside of Washington who will trust individuals. I've got an agenda that I want to get done for the country. (2)
It's an agenda that says we're going to reform Medicare to make sure seniors have got prescription drugs and to give seniors different options from which they can choose. It's an agenda that says we're listen to the young voices in Social Security and say we're going to think differently about making sure we have a system, but also fulfil the promise to the seniors in America. A promise made will be a promise kept should I be fortunate enough to become your president. I want to have the military keeping the peace. I want to make sure the public school system in America keeps its promise so not one child is left behind. After setting priorities, I want to give some of your money back. I don't think the surplus is the government's money. I think it's the people's money. I don't think it exists because of the ingenuity and hard work of the federal government, I think in exists because of the ingenuity and hard work of the American people. And you ought to have some of this surplus so you can save and dream and build. (3)
I look forward to the final weeks of this campaign. I'm asking for your vote. For those of you for me, thanks for your help. For those of you for my opponent, please only vote once. (LAUGHTER) But for those who have not made up their mind, I would like to conclude by this promise. Should I be fortunate enough to become your president, when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of the land, but I will also swear to uphold the honor and the dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God. Thank you very much. (4)
18Bush, unlike Gore, cashed in extensively on his warm “deep South” gentility throughout the campaign, and so capitalized on this social attractiveness in the debates whenever possible. Besides carefully maintaining his rather strong Texan accent (which includes the systematic dropping of the g in the -ing ending in favor of the more colloquial -in'), the first movement of Bush's closing statement remains down-to-earth (“the folks”/the ellipse of the subject in the sentence “Appreciate the chance…”). Movements 2 and 3, which sum up his campaign promises, are delivered in the fashion of a structured oralized - i.e. written to be spoken - campaign speech, with the use of repeated opening phrases (“it's an agenda that …”/ “I want to …”/”I don't think … I think”) and an occasional catch phrase such as “so not one child is left behind” in movement 2. But where Bush's elocutionary force becomes most evident is in the final movement of the closing statement, in which he is both able to surprise by cracking a joke (“For those of you for my opponent, vote only once”), appeal to the highly conservative religious right (reference to the Bible) and make direct criticism of Clinton's behavior without ever mentioning his name (“to uphold the honor and the dignity of the office to which I have been elected”). This last statement, because it ends with the ritual formula “so help me God” –the ritualistic ending to the President's oath of office– gives the listener the impression that he/she is actually hearing Bush being sworn in.
19Such image mediation via carefully rehearsed discourse is necessary in the American politician's repertoire, especially in the Presidential elections. All in all, the televized debates of American Presidential campaigns can be seen as producing both eufunctional and dysfunctional results (Chaffee and Dennis 1979: 97). The eufunctional result of the debates resides in the way debates exemplify free political competition, with the parties in direct confrontation and the national audience as judge. The dramatization of the American democratic system, relayed by television –the primary vehicle of popular culture– can help restore public confidence in the government, especially in times of political crisis. Nonetheless, these positive aspects may be overshadowed by the dysfunctional results of the debates: on the one hand, televized debates reinforce the “star system”, by focusing the nation's attention on two candidates and their “horserace” for a single office, thus effacing the importance of other levels of government, other candidates, other issues and even the political parties behind these races. Chaffee & Dennis go so far as to conclude that
The historical tendencies toward concentration of power in the federal government, especially the executive branch, and the general decline of public enthusiasm for the major parties seem to be exacerbated by the personalization of politics inherent in the debate format. (1979: 98)
20The way in which candidates mediate this “personalization of politics” through specifically constructed discourse will continue to fuel another debate, that of the media's responsibility in the ever-growing Tower of Babel of American elections and political life.