Obama Signals He Won't Back Down to GOP Smears

Since the rise of television as a major force in American politics, and particularly since Joe McGinnis's extraordinary behind-the-scenes portrait of how the 1968 Nixon campaign, led by a team of advertising men, manipulated the public image of Richard Nixon in The Selling of the President, many have expressed concerns about the extent to which voters can really get a sense of the candidates through the lens of the television camera. Their reasons are well founded. Media campaigns turned George W. Bush into an "everyday guy" despite his wealth, connections, and Andover/Yale/Harvard MBA pedigree; into a "compassionate conservative" despite his record of executing a fellow born-again Christian as Texas governor; and as a steady hand in times of national danger who could lead the country to safety. And the data are clear from 40 years of electoral history and the data from tens of thousands of surveys over the same time frame that people vote primarily with their emotions: they choose the party whose principles resonate with them emotionally and the candidate they feel in their gut they can trust and understands people like them.

But Tuesday night, when Barack Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination, voters saw the three last candidates standing all speak in rapid succession, all of whom revealed important aspects of who they are.

John McCain's appearance an hour before Obama's victory speech itself spoke volumes. For a man who spoke with the word "Honor" on hand-held placards all around him, it was a dishonorable thing to do. Presumptive nominees do not typically deliver primetime speeches just before their rival becomes their general-election opponent to try to inoculate against both his message and his moment. Democratic leaders did not deliver a primetime speech excoriating McCain an hour before he clinched the Republican nomination. As I recall, Barack Obama congratulated him. That's how gentlemen have typically responded to their rivals' ascension to the nomination.

But the content of McCain's speech revealed far more than the fact of it. What voters watched -- and processed unconsciously and emotionally, even if they could not put their finger on it--was a man who seems utterly rudderless in his principles, punctuating rhetorical lines that belie virtually everything he has said at some point since running for Republican nomination -- with manufactured smiles where his handlers obviously advised him on his supersized teleprompter, "insert smile here." Our brains are equipped to tell the difference between real and genuine smiles, and McCain has such a poor poker face that he would be well advised just to tell the truth from here on out in his campaign, if there is a truth anymore to tell about whether he cared about the people of New Orleans when they were crying for help from their roofs while he was eating his birthday cake with President Bush, or whether he is for or against the kind of torture he endured as a prisoner or war.

Hillary Clinton's decision to rattle off of her victories in swing states, her claim to have won more votes than anyone in the history of the presidential nominating process (including her victorious rival), and her refusal even to acknowledge her opponent's victory (congratulating him on having "run," not won, a fine campaign, after being introduced by her campaign chairman as "the next President of the United States," as if she were magnanimously congratulating the loser), spoke to precisely the three aspects of her character that voters worried they saw over this long primary campaign: her difficulty showing warmth and graciousness, her seeming willingness to put her own interests and ambitions over the interests of both the party her husband led and the country both of them love, and her defensiveness when confronted with a mistake or a defeat.