Presidential candidates must be real these days
One of John Kennedy’s great virtues as a politician was his refusal to say and do things that he deemed inauthentic. Once, while campaigning for president, he listened as some other candidates extolled their humble roots. The son of one of America’s richest men began his own remarks with a quip: “I guess I’m the only one here who was not born in a log cabin.”
Kennedy begged off donning a 10-gallon cowboy hat when he was given one by a business group in Texas on the Friday morning of his death, sticking to a vow never to be photographed wearing (for him) a silly-looking hat.
He promised to put it on the following Monday at the White House, the day, it turned out, of his funeral.
Stumping for the job of president in dirt-poor West Virginia in the spring of 1960, Kennedy refused to play down the fact that his family had money, and plenty of it.
According to a Washington columnist of the time, Doris Fleeson, the Kennedys’ make-up would not allow them “to condescend to a less well-off public. … They come from the great world, and they carry it with them. Some observers think it is a large part of their appeal.”
Instead of pretending to be something he wasn’t, Kennedy concentrated on how he could connect with voters in other ways.
Probably no one in the history of American politics was more adept at getting people to nod their heads in agreement with something he had said — another columnist of the time noting JFK’s single goal while speaking was to reach voters, to change minds, to turn them in his favor. Through years of trial and error, Kennedy learned to calibrate his words and speeches for maximum effectiveness.
No one should expect today’s candidates to operate at the same high level. Kennedy was a once-in-a-generation politician. Still, his example is relevant. Politics in 2015 is so contrived as to be alien to the vast majority of Americans.
The candidates best able to break free of the strictures of conventional, modern-day politicking — with its trite phrases, coded words and empty television ads will likely be rewarded.
All of which brings us to Donald Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul, promoter, and television personality who, defying the odds, remains at or near the top of the heap of Republicans vying for their party’s presidential nomination.
Trump is a phenomenon and not always in a good way. Just the other day he trashed rival Ben Carson’s religion. It was a stunning instance of intolerance and bigotry that should not go unpunished.
Likewise, he’s trashed, at one time or another, women, Mexicans, and John McCain, saying he didn’t think the former Navy pilot was especially heroic as a prisoner of war. Trump broadly implied that he didn’t cotton to soldiers who happened to get captured. I half expected him to say he didn’t put much stock in presidents who managed to get themselves assassinated — hence, a disdain for Lincoln.
Trump, an extremely self-confident gent, has gotten away with saying these things (so far, anyway) because people perceive him as being real. To many Americans, Trump is the anti-politician; even half-baked ideas are fine with them, as long as they come from a guy who seems to be genuine.
The other day a twenty-something told me she preferred Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. She liked, she said, the fact that Bernie was less polished than Hillary. Translation, he was real — therefore honest, trustworthy.
In her calculation, a bona fide personality was all. Maybe it’s always been this way, though a long spell of cookie-cutter candidates, molded by polls and whipped into shape by professional political consultants peddling the same tired arguments election after election, have whetted appetites for candidates who appear to be their truthful selves.
The revolt against the artificial may have reached full flower in Trump and Sanders, two men who are otherwise startlingly dissimilar.
A voter yearning for authenticity has a hard time finding it in any part of the political world. Even candidates for state senate, for instance, use the hollowed out, pernicious language of the consultant class. Thus, we hear again and again about candidates who do not “share our values”, a slur that defames not merely an opponent but a whole class of citizens.
Talk about looking past one another. Talk about raising barriers to working across party lines. Talk about artificial.
Do the candidates believe what they’re saying? No, not based on the reporting that’s been done on the Guy Reschenthaler-Heather Arnet race in Allegheny County this year or the reporting conducted last year when Pat Stefano took on Deberah Kula.
What the candidates broadcast in their television ads doesn’t necessarily square with what they tell reporters.
The fakery must end. Just maybe Trump and Sanders have shaken up things to the point that politicians can climb out of the hole they’ve put themselves in. Maybe even without their knowing it, Trump and Sanders have performed a great service in helping to rescue politics, however briefly, from the contrived and artificial. Maybe.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.