John McCain is a war hero and seems authentic. George W. Bush has the brains of a rocking horse but the bloodlines of a winner. Bill Bradley is a hoopster, also authentic. Al Gore is a cigar store Indian who hugs trees. Everyone else is support act fodder.
Thus goes the shorthand handicapping for this year's US presidential race. With less than 50 per cent of the American electorate engaged to the point where they can name all the candidates, politicians struggle to escape the shackles of caricature. Mostly they blame the media. Mostly they are right.
In the great travelling circus that is the presidential election, television is the ring master. The boys and girls of the print world form a disgruntled orchestra which tootles along earnestly as TV calls the shots.
And as Roone Arledge, chairman of NBC News, pointed out to the Columbia Journalism Review last month, the combined viewership on all networks of all the hours combined of Democratic primary conventions in 1996 (four days apiece) added up to less than an average audience for ER.
Somewhere out there a fundamental debate on healthcare is taking place between the Democratic candidates. You catch the drift of it in newspapers, on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and C-Span. Yet it is the nightly network news and the network-hosted debates which count. They don't do nuance.
The smart politician plays it as it lays. George W. Bush was on television just before Christmas and was asked whose political philosophy had influenced him the most. Good question for a political scion. After a brief pause he offered his answer: "Christ, because he changed my heart".
When the nausea subsided most political analysts agreed that the answer was probably perfect for the medium. Earlier Bill Bradley had replied: "Mikhail Gorbachev, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter", an answer of such thoughtful honesty that his campaign team had to commit him to a political intensive care unit for a few days.
Explaining the virtues of Gorbachev, Carter and Wilson is a non-televisual process, while Jesus Christ is a ratings topper. Television debate formats don't allow a follow-up query exploring, say, Jesus's views on George W.'s merciless application of the death penalty in Texas. George W. knew that.
So drafting Jesus Christ was a stroke. In trouble in spikey, independent-minded New Hampshire, where John McCain is making the running, Bush needs to show exceedingly well in South Carolina on February 19th to get his groove back. South Carolina is conservative, Bible belt country, and although Bush leads comfortably in the polls, McCain - with the possibility of momentum out of New Hampshire and his appeal to 400,000 army veterans among South Carolina's two million voters - still represents a threat.
Bush took Jesus as running mate and looked right over New Hampshire into South Carolina. One sentence. Bam!
It is a harsh business, politics refashioned as horse-race-cum-soap-opera. John McCain, war hero and Republican insurgent, can't quite make television hum. Unlike most mortals he loves the company of journalists and has coffee, doughnuts and gossip with them at the back of the bus every day. But this ease doesn't translate on to television where he looks like a fountain trapped in a stalagmite. He hasn't the spark to illuminate Bush's shallowness.
Oddly, on the Democratic side the medium works a little better for Al Gore. High name recognition and a poor but dogged debating style tend to offset the fact that all appearances are a struggle against rigor mortis for the Vice-President. He debates in a juvenile way, emitting theatrical sighs as his opponent speaks. A couple of weeks ago he pulled an embarrassing little stunt when he tried to get Bill Bradley to shake hands on a pact to bore American to death by debating on air twice a week.
Bradley pulled away from Gore's outstretched hand as if it were so much rotting flesh, but Gore's niggling combativeness is clearly making Bradley tetchy. Thus the televisual Catch-22. If Bradley responds he is engaging in (big yawn) "politics as usual". So Bradley tries to ignore Gore. He is accused of being aloof, the least of three evils.
For now the spotlights are on the Iowa caucuses (January 24th) and New Hampshire a week later. Whatever happens, TV will be the winner. The ads are 30 seconds of goldspun biography and a line saying the candidate courageously thinks that Mom's apple pie is a good thing.
Whatever. The networks win. For instance, in Iowa candidates are permitted a spend of $1 million, based on the state's voting age population. Most will spend the bulk on network television advertising.
Bill Bradley, for instance, buoyed by poll boosts late in November, booked $1 million worth of Iowa advertising in December and got a derogation to spend even more money on advertising in the state. Most of the candidates have maxed out on expenditure in New Hampshire ($600,000) and so have begun advertising heavily on Boston stations that beam into southern New Hampshire. There will be room for this. Massachusetts votes on March 7th, the same day as the all-important Californian and New York primaries.
If the politicians play it safe, so do the hacks. The media have stopped dealing in common scandal. When rumours of George W. Bush's alleged cocaine use hung juicily in early summer, many were the hands which reached up, but great and swift was the wave of self-chastisement which issued from the media immediately afterwards.
Lewinsky et al left a sour taste, so this could be a kid-gloves campaign. What will be interesting are the intangibles. Bradley and McCain appear to be tapping into a new vein of political sentiment, most startlingly evident when former wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota for the Reform Party in 1998. Ventura ran 14 points off the pace in polling, yet had a three-point winning margin.
Campaigning has spread to the Internet. The Bush campaign - which spent a considerable sum buying up possibly abusive names for anti-Bush websites - has been spending heavily on the Internet, running banner ads on America Online which lead to profiles that are custom-tailored to appeal to the demographic you log in from.
On the downside, five minutes of surfing throws up links to negative sites dealing with the candidates' locked closets. This was the journalistic demimonde which gave us the stain on the blue cocktail dress in 1998.
Who knows what else might get thrown up this summer?
