Statecraft and Stagecraft: American Political Life in the Age of Personality, Second Edition

By Robert Schmuhl

In this second edition of Statecraft and Stagecraft Robert Schmuhl brings up to date his provocative exploration of the involvement of the media in our public life by including a new chapter on the Persian Gulf War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 1992
• ISBN: 9780268160692

Robert Schmuhl

Robert Schmuhl is the Walter H. Annenberg–Edmund P. Joyce Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 1980. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Ireland's Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising, Wounded Titans: American Presidents and the Perils of Power, in addition to Indecent Liberties, Fifty Years with Father Hesburgh, The Glory and the Burden, In So Many More Words and Demanding Democracy all published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Book preview

Statecraft and Stagecraft

Statecraft

and

Stagecraft

American Political Life in the Age of Personality

SECOND EDITION

Robert Schmuhl

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 1992 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schmuhl, Robert.

Statecraft and Stagecraft: American political life in the age of personality / Robert Schmuhl. —2nd ed.

p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-268-01744-1 (pbk.)

1. Mass media—Political aspects—United States. 2. United States—Politics and government—1981–1989. 3. United States—Politics and government—1989– . I. Title

P95.82.U6S35 1992

302.23'0973—dc20

91-44655

CIP

ISBN 9780268160692

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail].

FOR JUDY

Contents

Foreword to the 2016 Printing

Preface

1 Smokeless Politics

2 Image-Making and Anti-Image Journalism

3 The Bully Pulpit at Center Stage

4 The Momentary Majority

5 Cyclops or Big Bird?

6 Temptations of Technology

Postscript: The Theater of War, The War as Theater, and Other Matters

Notes

Acknowledgments and Annotations

Foreword to the 2016 Printing

A quarter century ago, the Age of Personality—a phrase in this book’s subtitle—was the relatively youthful progeny of the marriage between that time’s statecraft and stagecraft. In 2016, Donald J. Trump discombobulated the Republican Party and American politics by epitomizing the dominance of the personality as presented and projected by the media. His celebrity and charisma—as well as his ability to command television airwaves and different forms of social media—carried much greater weight than multipoint policy proposals, long-term party allegiance, or a definite political ideology, as he competed for the presidency. His appeal proved to be primarily visceral and emotional rather than intellectual.

Just as Trump’s emergence symbolized the rise of forces—populist anger, nationalistic fervor, anti-establishment or anti-elite bias, and all the rest—that he came to embody, so, too, Trump was an exemplar of a public figure who could take advantage of the various instruments of stagecraft to become a political player with considerable clout. A prior career as a star on a reality television show, coupled with his own business success in real estate, had made him a household name before he announced his candidacy—to nearly universal derision—on June 16, 2015.

As his campaign gained more of a following, some commentators and political experts suggested comparisons between Trump and Ronald Reagan, who receives considerable attention in the pages that follow. Superficial parallels between the two do exist. As both embarked on careers in politics, they understood how important the media had become in American civic life. Reagan, however, had spent several decades in Hollywood, working from scripts for movies and television programs, before he decided to run for governor of California in 1966 and again in 1970. What he said to the public was largely prepared in advance (scripted, if you will), and he often wrote his own statements before delivering them.

Trump, by contrast, is a product of reality television, with its emphasis on the vivid personality of the main character and on dialogue that is overwhelmingly improvisational. It’s situational, extemporaneous communication that matters rather than deliberately planned, even crafted, expressions such as those Reagan delivered. Moreover, eight years as governor of a large, diverse state provide experiences for the daily hurly-burly a president might—and does—confront. To paraphrase a former vice-presidential candidate, Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan.

The magnification of the personality has increased in power and consequence since Statecraft and Stagecraft first appeared. Moreover, the proliferation of media platforms—or ways of acquiring political information—has radically changed the relationship between a citizen and American civic life. Millennials and many Baby Boomers now take for granted an endless array of messages, abbreviated or extended, on their laptops, tablets, or smartphones as well as more traditional means of communication, like television, radio, or print. From the 1990s to today, the media landscape has gone from a field with a sturdy stand of several, deeply-rooted trees—three major commercial television networks, a few key newspapers and magazines, and such—to a dense forest, as far as the eye can see, of arboreal specimens that vary in type, scope, audience, presentation, and viewpoint in the delivery of political content.

A short timeline helps show how the media landscape has developed over the past twenty-five years, altering substantially the ways in which Americans receive information about politics and government:

Each of these technological inventions or innovations expanded the possibility for the presentation of political communication. Many more sources, though, challenged traditional outlets for audience and attention. It’s important to remember: A person has a finite amount of time to spend with the media on any given day. If new forms of media and their messages appeal to someone, sources that came into existence earlier will lose some of their followers. For example, in 1980, the year CNN began its all-news format, 52 million people (out of nearly 227 million Americans) watched the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC. That meant 75 percent of television sets were turned to network news each night. By contrast, Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media 2015 reported that total viewership for ABC, CBS, and NBC has now dropped to about 24 million—less than half the earlier audience—at a time when the population exceeds 320 million people.

A useful way to view the contemporary communications galaxy is the metaphorical description formulated by Tom Brokaw, the long-time anchor and correspondent for NBC News. In the book No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle (2008) by Howard Rosenberg and Charles S. Feldman, Brokaw explains: I think we are in the middle of another Big Bang. We’ve created this universe in which all these planets are suddenly out there colliding with each other. We are trying to determine which ones will support life, which ones will drift too close to the sun and burn up, which ones will meld with another. And the effect of it all is bewildering, both to those of us in this end of the spectrum and those who are on the receiving end. It’s a big dilemma and we haven’t given enough thought to the consequences.

This contemporary Big Bang has turned the communications world upside down in a continuing series of inversions from how it used to be:

•    From relatively few sources (and a common body of shared information), there are now a multitude of different sources, with smaller audiences on what Brokaw called the receiving end. The mass (of the phrase mass media) contracts as outlets proliferate—and even terms change to become more precise. Broadcasting downsizes to narrowcasting—and shrinks further to what’s now known as slivercasting.

•    From what used to be relatively expensive messages, there are now free outlets for the same messages. Newspapers and magazines that previously required payment for their content now (in most cases) provide it without charge over the Internet. When someone learns of an article of interest, the current impulse is to check it out on the Web rather than buy a copy of the publication in which it appears.

•    From traditional journalistic sources, there are now hybrid forms. We see this in the combining of news with entertainment. The so-called fake news of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show or the satiric treatments on display in HBO’s Last Week Tonight or regularly in The Onion are cases in point. In this realm, we also find the convergence of news and opinion in a single source—as, of course, happens with radio talk shows, on Websites like The Drudge Report or The Huffington Post, and throughout the ever-expanding social-media complex of instant messaging.

•    From professional journalists providing news, analysis, and commentary, there are now citizen-journalists—armies of amateurs weighing in by using new technologies with their reports, images, and perspectives. Several of the social-networking sites provide on the scene accounts from firsthand observers, and these posts now often find their way to outlets with larger audiences.

All of these circumstances, from few to many, from expensive to free, from news to entertainment mixed with opinion, and from professional to amateur, create a much different media world from the one that existed just a quarter century ago. With political communication in particular, the ascendancy of opinion demands focused scrutiny and inquiry concerning its consequences for the body politic and civic thought. Talk radio, cable news, blogs, fiercely polemical books, and all the rest create a modern-day version of a partisan press that, in terms of advocacy and the intention to persuade, bears definite similarities to what existed at our nation’s founding.

Michael Gerson, who was President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter and subsequently a columnist for the Washington Post, assessed the evolving media landscape in his column shortly after Barack Obama’s election to the White House in 2008. Because of the ideological polarization of cable television news, talk radio and the Internet, Americans can now get their information from entirely partisan sources, he observed. They can live, if they choose to, in an ideological world of their own creation, viewing anyone outside that world as an idiot or criminal, and finding many who will cheer their intemperance.

In other words, the unwavering, take-no-prisoner partisanship that we’ve witnessed in American politics over the past twenty-five years or so is relentlessly reinforced by certain media with a political objective, and that leads to even greater polarization. Among the more independent-minded public, the perception of constant warfare, which increasingly leads to a sense of dysfunction, gridlock, and paralysis, builds and intensifies together with a general feeling of frustration.

These political and media realities place a heavier burden on the citizenry, as we try to carry out our democratic obligations and responsibilities. A few shorthand suggestions might provide a primer of guidance: Be active rather than passive, be selective amid the abundance, and be civically reflective despite the array of other, more entertaining messages that can easily distract us from public purpose.

In this Age of Personality, we also reside in a era of media abundance, if not obesity. This means that it’s essential to seek a balanced menu of informational choices. The smorgasbord of offerings might be endless, but it’s up to each of us to make the most nutritional selections. This is particularly true in the realm of civic knowledge, and here a distinction seems in order. At times, we are consumers; at other times, we are citizens—and the two roles are quite different. We are consumers of entertainment news, celebrity coverage, reality programs, and the like. We are citizens when evaluating information about electoral matters and governance related to the conduct of democracy.

As mentioned earlier, the work of the citizen-journalist receives considerable attention now, as the possibilities for collecting and transmitting information and images keep expanding. But someone today ought also to be what we might call a journalist-citizen. In this rearrangement of the two roles, the journalist-citizen is a person who is deliberate in seeking the truth about public affairs and discriminating in judging the merits of information about those affairs from a variety of sources. To a certain extent, each of us needs to become our own investigative reporter to get to the bottom of complicated issues.

Both the statecraft and the stagecraft of American political life have undergone profound changes since this book’s second edition came out in 1992. Even more than back then, it’s up to a contemporary journalist-citizen to probe beyond the sound bites, the tweets, and the statements of any personality, of whatever party, in deciding who deserves the responsibility to exercise the power and authority of governmental leadership during the next quarter century and beyond.

Preface

A few months before his death in 1961, James Thurber began an essay about the relationship between politics and entertainment by writing: History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.

As Thurber notes, the interplay between political acting and performing for the public extends back in time as far as a historian—or humorist—can see. In recent years, the lines between statecraft and stagecraft have faded to the point that the two now blur together. A legacy of the Reagan presidency is the lesson that statecraft can be enhanced through stagecraft. For eight years, political action and public policy followed not only briefing books but scripts. Substance coexisted with a style of presentation that effectively exploited the dramatic values of the various sources of popular communication responsible for covering the White House.

Ronald Reagan rarely missed a cue, but it is wrong to think that the drawing together of statecraft and stagecraft resulted from having an actor elected president. The linkage between public policy and public performance for a mass audience has a rich heritage in twentieth-century American political history. Theodore Roosevelt commanded the silver screen in the early days of the movies, and Franklin Roosevelt chatted with a nation via the radio. Videogenic, image-sensitive John Kennedy pioneered the use of television in conducting public affairs, and twenty years later Reagan raised that use to an art form. Reagan also refused to abandon his professional roots. The old sports announcer conducted a weekly radio program of plain talk about his perspectives and proposals for a national audience.

The Reagan years magnified the relationship between statecraft and stagecraft. That relationship, however, grows out of a sociocultural climate that is dramatically different from what it was just three decades ago. Since the 1960s, modes of popular communication, especially television, have grown in significance, influencing all aspects of American life. The political world—of campaigning and governing, of civic participation and public discourse—is