In a February 2011 interview with Ron Suskind, President Barack Obama noted that “the symbols and gestures – what people are seeing coming out of this office – are at least as important as the policies we put forward.”
That surely warmed the heart of Yale University sociologist Jeffrey Alexander. The professor's only disagreement might be to stress that symbols and gestures are far more important than policies. Indeed, he argues, they are “at the center of the struggle for power in democratic societies” (275).
In The Performance of Politics Alexander traces the battle over “the attribution of meaningfulness” (9) in the 2008 American presidential campaign. He argues that candidate Obama was able to become a mythic hero, to “sacralize himself” (111) by transforming himself into “a symbolic vessel filled with what citizens hold most dear” (18): the authentic collective representation of the civil sphere. Candidates McCain, Palin, and Clinton, by contrast, failed to earn that legitimacy; they were seen by the public merely as false performers, even as destructive to civil peace. That last follows because candidates live in a “binary” world of symbolism, where one is either perfect or evil – they must constantly paint themselves as the former, of course, and their opponents as the latter. In doing so they “walk the boundaries” between the civil sphere and other parts of human life – experiences with religion, gender, race, and so on, careful to stay just on the right side of the line.
The empirical, for this purpose, is the editorial. Alexander utilizes a detailed sequence of press coverage (mostly from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal) and poll results to assess candidate efforts to define themselves and their opponents, then how those efforts are received. In one intriguing instance his analysis takes the form of a sort of live blog – termed here a “media ethnography” (21) – of the MSNBC coverage of the Democratic National Convention. He has also conducted interviews with elite reporters to tease out the motivations behind the stories he cites.
Alexander identifies three vital periods during the 2008 general election where the meaning of each candidate was in flux. The first, from late July to late August, follows the McCain campaign's efforts to paint Obama as a “celebrity” lightweight, famous for being famous but incapable of being President. This proves to be “the right trope at the right time” (179), at least temporarily. The second traces “the Palin effect,” the flurry of excitement that greeted the Alaska governor's selection as McCain's running mate in late August. The third examines the impact of the financial meltdown in September. In each case, Alexander traces campaigns’ efforts to reshape the narrative, the media's transmission of and commentary on the same, and the resultant movement in the polls. In each case, Obama came out on top – transcending the celebrity trope with the feisty gravity of his Denver address; watching warily as Palin talked away her own legitimacy (with some interpretive help from Tina Fey); and responding calmly and analytically – presidentially – to the Wall Street meltdown, even as McCain blustered and blundered.
Key to the argument is the notion that the ultimate outcome could have veered onto a different course at any of these junctures. Alexander repeatedly transposes this claim with what he terms “demographic determinism” (245), the idea that electoral outcomes can be predicted from economic, ethnic, or regional distributions. “If such predictive models really do hold sway,” he says, “then the political disappears, and the significance of electoral democracy is whisked away” (281).
It is hard to argue with the basic notion that campaign narrative matters – or, more basically, that campaigns matter. After all, if we know by May 2012 who will win in November, why do candidates bother to raise and spend so much money? Why bother to eat the thousandth broiled chicken breast in the thousandth American Legion hall? Why not just inaugurate, ahem, President Gore in 2001? Alexander does an elegant job tracing the flow of the prevailing frame of the race. The book's conception of the civil sphere and the threat posed to its illusion of unity by the realities of political campaigning is valid and valuable. It is right, too, to stress – in a compelling piece of fieldwork from an Obama volunteer “training camp” in Colorado – the critical role of inspiration and motivation in stirring a campaign's “ground game.”
Still, as a political scientist given regular inoculations against worship of even well-sacralized candidates, I was taken aback by the, well, “binary” portrayal of that discipline here. After all, the ideas of the moral and emotional grounding of politics, of politicians as performers, of the notion of narrative framing, are hardly new to or absent from my field. When Alexander talks about “students of politics,” his footnotes show that he means political journalists or pundits, rarely scholars of elections or political communication. This is surely a bit of bait and switch.
To be sure, Alexander is right to claim that political science rarely produces “a great book about a political campaign” (xii). A great book has to have character, plot, unpredictability – and the point of political science is to show the underlying regularities in political behavior regardless of personality. The key question is surely not whether predictive models “hold sway” – no one claims that they have independent power in this sense. It is, rather, whether they predict. And they do.
Consider the economic or “retrospective” voting literature exploring the vote as a predictable referendum grounded in national conditions. To posit that “only after it's all over do social scientists and pundits claim the contest was predetermined to come out in this or that way” (163) is unfair at least to social scientists. Alan Abramowitz, for instance, calculated in the summer of 2008 that the Democratic candidate would receive 54·3 percent of the two-party vote. Abramowitz's model was grounded in second-quarter economic conditions and voter assessments of the incumbent party – it did not include any tracking polls between Obama and McCain, which would admittedly be endogenous to Alexander's campaign effects. In fact, a simple model plotting the incumbent's party share of the two-party vote against consumer confidence figures in May of the election year indicated the Republicans would garner just about 46 percent of that vote in 2008. The actual figures were 53·7 percent for Obama, 46·3 percent for McCain. It is hard to think that the Clinton vote would have diverged significantly from this.
Again, that does not mean that symbolic framing is unimportant. But it is hard to know just how important it is, controlling for other variables with an impact on vote choice. Framing could well be necessary – if nothing else, the campaign serves to remind people of their prior preferences, and to energize them to express them – but it is not sufficient. One issue, as Alexander points out, is that committed partisans are more or less immune to the tug of the narrative flow – they will vote for their candidate even if he is a yellow dog (indeed, even if she is Sarah Palin). The relative importance of “performance” thus varies with the existence of a large persuadable segment of the electorate. And while it is true that “self-declared independents” have doubled in number since the 1950s (9), a large body of literature takes issue with that finding unless it is carefully qualified. As early as 1992 Bruce Keith and his co-authors noted The Myth of the Independent Voter. Recent work suggests that only about seven percent of voters (not the one-third often claimed in surveys) do not have a predictable partisan leaning.
It would have been intriguing to see Alexander's sequential narrative of media coverage applied more systemically to the primary season. As it stands, we are told that Hillary Clinton was seen as “inauthentic” – but we really only know this because she lost. A not-implausible (though less heroic) counterfactual might simply posit Clinton's having hired campaign staff who knew how the Democratic Party's system of delegate allocation worked. Is the difference between authenticity and inauthenticity simply the deficit of delegates Clinton earned in Texas or Nevada, despite winning those states’ primaries? Even the culture of inspiration Alexander documents at the Obama volunteer training had to be followed up with the hard grind of door-knocking and list management (at which the Obama organization excelled.) Still, clearly a narrative did develop. Why else did the Democratic “superdelegates,” created precisely to be undemocratic arbiters of the party's general-election chances, break so heavily to Obama? Some discussion of how the outside game affected the inside game and vice versa would likely only strengthen Alexander's argument.
The Performance of Politics has much to recommend it as a study of the social flow of macro-communications. Those interested in the mythic nature of American political campaigns – the sacred and profane both – will find much to like. To be sure, it is best read as a supplement to, not substitute for, the literature it disparages in absentia. But it is hardly too early to prepare for the making of meaning in 2012.
