Wooden Man Principle

By the time people vote, they have been given many reasons to choose one candidate over another. In a general election, for instance, the first thirty or forty percentage points of the population are nailed to a party in a way that almost no candidate can pry away. Some of this is due to the way people identify with the principles of a party or with what it has done or the candidates it has run in other races. The people in these groups are important to the outcome of elections less for what they do at the polls than for whether they show up, vote, and have their vote properly counted. Hence the term "energize your base."

This said, most general elections for president are not decided by the party faithful so much as they are decided by the 35% of voters who enter the process without party affiliation and without strong prejudice about which candidate they will vote for. If one could propose a model that would explain which way this 35% was likely to swing and to explain how to predispose the party faithful to show up, it would be worthy of some further investigation.

In light of this idea I offer for consideration of those much more systemmatic in testing hypotheses a fresh and completely untested hypothesis: The wooden man principle. The wooden man principle posits that in a nationwide election in which there are two candidates, nominees of their two respective parties, the man who wins the election will be the one who looks less wooden. We cannot be certain that the wooden man principle played any role in national elections before the televised debates of Kennedy vs Nixon. But it certainly did then.

Interestingly, it is posited that Nixon won the radio debates but Kennedy won the television ones. This raises the question of why. The common wisdom here has to do with Kennedy's natural good looks and with Nixon's suderific excesses. I am not quite so sure of either of these specifics, but I think we might properly conclude from this observation that woodenness is a quality we assess from visual clues.

Two visual cues are readily apparent. One is body stiffness. Candidates that are too stiff tend to look "wooden." Nixon always looked stiff. It was a quality rarely evident in Kennedy's motion. Candidates with more fluid, natural motions tend to look natural. The second is facial expression. My own guess is that one could find six or ten meaningful categories here. I propose at the outset just one. I call it "reactivity." It relates to how facial expressions correspespond to language, spoken and heard. Good correspondence is higher reactivity.

In the course of normal daily interactions, people smile and change expression as they interact with others. This process of changing expression is a natural part of verbal expression for most people. And it conveys a great deal of meaning, framing the words that people say. The face has over sixty separate muscles that can be used to create expressions, and it is capable of untold billions of seperate expressive states. Huge swathes of brain tissue are dedicated to perceiving and interpreting these expressions. There are compelling social and evolutionary reasons for this, most of which we probably do not yet know or understand. Nevertheless, it is important.

When one sees a candidate whose face fails to be expressive in a way that is consonant with the words he is speaking, the natural reaction is to imagine that the candidate is being deceptive, or that he is hiding something. In other words, a candidate with a wooden espression undermines his own message. Take the race of Bush vs Dukakis. Nobody has ever accused Bush (41) of being the most fluid candidate in the world; he is quite wooden. But Dukakis outdid him in this department quite decisively. And lost. Dukakis almost never cracked a smile. He rarely gestured. He was always measured, and never animated. Bush was quite understated, but he did these things, a tiny bit.

At the other end of the extreme is Clinton. Clinton was quite animated. He reacted strongly to questions and he never appeared very guarded. By the standard of reactivity it was hard to imagine that Clinton was deceiving. Clinton's radiance did, however, present a different problem. There were those who took it as a sign of being disingenuous, slick. Clinton smiled so much that it was hard to imagine that it was not just an act. It was hard to imagine it was not just a salesman's grin. This is not a smear without some merit; people do smile to hide other emotional states. And it is doubtless that Clinton engaged in this from time to time. But in Clinton's case, he genuinely likes other people. He genuinely likes being in the spotlight. The smile was mostly genuine. We believe he meant what he said, he believed what he said. Some even argued it was true of the several statements that materially misled.

Most of the time the grin was a natural expression of Clinton's emotional state. And it won him a lot of votes. Not the grin per se, but the whole reactive gestalt. Reagan was clearly quite reactive as well. I am not sure I ever saw him speak, except for his final televised speech at the Republican nominating convention in 1988. By then he was old and tired and fragile. But this confluence of weaknesses had conspired to make him personally less threatening. I still imagine that his agenda has sent America hurtling toward fascism and economic ruin; but Reagan in that speech charmed. He was as far from wooden as one can be on a podium.

One can evaluate other presidential races along the same lines. Dubya was a bit less wooden than Gore and Kerry. For these reasons it was possible to imagine that he won the elections that nominally put him in the White House. This is a close call, I could imagine arguing the opposite had Kerry or Gore been properly credited with the votes that were cast for them.

Candidates raised in the center of the country, and the south, tend to be less prone to the wooden man problem than men raised at its outer edges, particularly in the Puritan northeast where seriousness is considered a primary virtue. I think we know what the issue is, but to really define it in a way that is suitable for more rigorous empirical treatment we would need a more rigorous definition of "wooden" or "reactive" It could be quite quantitative, like counting "smiles," "grins," "grimaces" and so on as a percentage of time vocalizing. Or it could be done by polling and getting people's impressions about "trustworthiness" and whether a candidate "cares" about one's own condition. A perfect model would quatitatively link these two measurable qualities together and explain how they affect the outcome of the election.

For all of my own political life I have been concerned that campaigns have failed to focus on issues. Issues are the heart of politics. They are its lifeblood. A crucial presumption of the political election process is that candidates are people of good character who know the law and hold it in high regard in both fact and purpose. But recent experience suggest to me that issues are completely irrelevant when a candidate possesses a character that fails in this regard. Elect a scoundrel who does not believe in constitutional principles and rule of law, then the issues cease to be of any importance whatsoever.The thing of importance in such a case is the restoration of rule of law. For while rule of law is suspended, the situation is desparate. (echoing Montesquieu) Issues no longer matter. They no longer exist in the democratic sense.

The wooden man principle is loosely related to this. People who worry that a candidate's expression hides something are, in fact, worrying about things that are categorically similar to this problem. They worry that the wrong sort of expression hides a person very different from the words that emmanate from the same body. In the case of Dubya, one might note that he was kept locked in the White House for the first five years of his reign. Then, when he was released to talk to people, he fumbled and mumbled, misspoke and retracted quite a lot. This was not the Dubya of the first campaign. There are lots of ways of parsing this series of events. One way is to imagine that Dubya had no idea how his administration would progress until September of his first year in office. And that was when his senior advisors began to reveal to him the trajectory of his administration.

Dubya is not a very facile liar. He really is not good at thinking one thing and saying another. This is how he won his first presidential election. He built trust on the basis of this quality. His mode of expression was open and conveyed to voters the idea that he was not hiding what he thought. But as president he has been called to speak things he knows are false. And he trips over his own words, backtracks, contradicts, fumbles, mumbles, hesitates, and so on with quite remarkable regularity. He leaves the impression of being incoherent, or he mumbles the same simple idea over and over again in differnent ways like a strange mantra. The hypothesis is, then, that Dubya had no idea how his reign might develop so he had nothing to hide during the first campaign.

If this view of things proves correct, it suggests that to a rather significant degree the wooden man principle serves the purpose of the electoral process, at least so long as an administration really does follow the lead of the president rather than vice versa. It tends to encourage the success of candidates who are emotively engaged with the messages they give us on the campaign trail. This emotive connection will normally lead us to a correct conclusion about the person's character. We can choose to accept or reject candidates, then, on the basis of not just what they tell us, but whether we perceive that they mean it. We are engaged in choosing not just on the basis of issues, but on the basis of character.

Sadly, the wooden man principle tells us nothing about how a man chooses his advisors or about their character. It would be wrong to say that the wooden man principle is highly reliable. We have certainly made bad choices because of it. Perhaps we have made bad choices despite it. It is nothing like perfect, and it falls pretty far short of being very good. Yet it is something. There is a lot to complain about in American politics. It is broken in more ways than we will ever be able to count. But in this one way nature and television have conspired to give us some tiny help in making good choices. You Tube doesn't hurt either.