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| DELIVERING THE MESSAGE | |
 August 18, 2000  |
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Three experts discuss the message and the media coverage of the Democratic National Convention. The NewsHour Media Unit is funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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 TERENCE
SMITH: To help us analyze that message, we're joined by Kathleen Hall
Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University
of Pennsylvania. And Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of The Los
Angeles Times, and Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at
the University of Southern California. Welcome to all three of you. Kathleen,
conventions are, after all, an exercise in communication. How effective
was this communication?
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: It's important to remember that even when you don't have high numbers of viewers across the experience of getting ready for the convention, having it appear, some people watched, national news, local news, you do get learning. We showed that in a survey after the Republican convention where the Bush's major themes got through. There was more accuracy. We expect that the same thing is going to happen from the Democrats. And contrary to what some of the pundits said, there was a key organizing theme in this convention. TERENCE SMITH: Namely…
TERENCE SMITH: Doyle, do you think it was conveyed well? DOYLE McMANUS: I think the message was conveyed well. But I think these Democrats had a problem in that they had three messages they wanted to convey at the same time-- and that's a hard road to hoe. As they described it themselves, they not only wanted to put across that issues message that Kathleen mentioned, they also wanted to convey a message about Al Gore's biography, that he's a more human, funnier, more real, salt-of-the-earth guy than you think he is. And then the third thing, and maybe in some ways the hardest, was they wanted to sort of take America by the lapels. The other line you heard in every speech was, this election matters. There are differences here -- because there have been in polls all year long, a very high number of voters saying, "I'm not sure it matters. I might vote either way." They've been terribly frustrated, these Democrats at the inability to get their own Democratic base and sympathetic independents to focus on what they're trying to say. |
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| The convention as a message | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: Marty Kaplan, you've written more than a few speeches. What did you think of both the speech and the convention, as a message?
On the Democrats' side though, they had to accomplish Gore saying, "I am my own man," and in the surplus, you hear the central substance of "I'm on your side," the kind of populism that swept through all the different issues. And then I think, again in contrast to Bush, he had the requirement to say, "boring is okay, broccoli is good, substance is fine. I respect you as a voter. I'm not going to just have partisan attacks. I'm not going to only use rhetoric. I'm not going to try to tap-dance my way through this thing. I'm going to take you seriously and I'm going to take my time, as a president might, in the State of the Union." TERENCE SMITH: Kathleen, what did you think of that self-deprecating approach? KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: I thought that what it accomplished was something that was very important in setting an agenda for the fall campaign, because what Gore was trying to do was to take a disadvantage -- that is, the fact that he's boring -- and translate it into somebody who cares about policy detail and cares about specifics. And one of the things I thought the speech managed to communicate successfully, by virtue of having so many specifics, was that this was a campaign that was ready to run on the details. Today, you hear George W. Bush saying in Tennessee that was Gore has is "promise not priority." But what is missed in all of that is the next step of the debate, and I see it going like this. The Gore campaign saying to the Bush campaign, "well, you've been talking about prescription drugs, we don't see it in your budget. How much does it cost? Where are you going to get the money?" TERENCE SMITH: Specifics, in other words.
TERENCE SMITH: Doyle, to use Vice President Gore's own words, did he project himself as "his own man." DOYLE McMANUS: I think he did, Terry. It was hard for him because it took President Clinton a little while longer than it needed to, to get offstage, and the kind of heroic scale of the Clinton speech on Monday, with that long walk down the hall, wasn't really designed, it seemed to me, to get him out of the delegates' or the voters' minds as quickly as it might have. But I thought-- this may be down to the level of detail, or of arcana-- I thought it was interesting that Al Gore, who for much of the year has flirted with earth tones, appeared last night in the presidential uniform: Blue suit, white shirt, red tie-- and he looked terrific. TERENCE SMITH: Presidential? DOYLE McMANUS: Presidential. |
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| Mixing the positive and negative | ||||||||||||||||||||
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MARTIN KAPLAN: I think it was a shrewd choice that he himself was largely positive. I think people feel that attacks is part of politics as usual and they want to take a shower when they have that experience. And by his focusing on attacking not his opponent, but the traditional populistic enemies like the big pharmacy companies, big oil, health maintenance organization bureaucrats, that he turned himself into a fighter on their side rather than a politician out to do a scorched earth campaign. TERENCE SMITH: And then left it to Senator Lieberman to carry the attack. MARTIN KAPLAN: Yes, exactly, which is, alas, a historic role for the Vice President, but he seems up for the job, as did his opponent, Dick Cheney. TERENCE SMITH: Right. The country seems, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, to be in a mood in which they're not very interested in hearing negative attacks. Is that right?
TERENCE SMITH: Was... The message varied, it seemed, Doyle, from night to night. Liberal on Tuesday, centrist on Wednesday, and then last night.
MARTIN KAPLAN: The Republicans conveyed the sense of "this is an infomercial" by being so much on message, so that the stagecraft, the kind of post-modern mechanics of image manipulation became the subject rather than the content. I think in this case, the subject is, what do we do with the surplus? Who's on your side? And in the contest between a kind of an image manipulation and caring about a particular set of issues, I think the Democrats won on that. TERENCE SMITH: Mm-hmm. And Kathleen, from those quotes you read at the very beginning, you found the message on message. KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Yeah, throughout the evening, even as you had nostalgia night, liberal night, the synthesis, the core message was getting through. One of the things that I think confused the people who sat in the sky booths and watched the convention gavel to gavel was that a lot of what looked to be incoherent was actually the Congressional and Senatorial candidates being positioned for local media with the party fully aware that national news wasn't going to give them any attention, nor were you in the sky boxes. And so I think that the conclusion that many people drew that this was not a coherent message is actually their misunderstanding of what was very coherent: Message, message, message to the congressional districts that are being contested. Remember, the Republicans didn't feature their members of Congress or Senate. As a result, they lost that local news advantage. And we followed the process of watching those local folks get up and talk about their issues to a virtually empty hall with some scattered applause. But if you noticed, there was always off to the podium, the local news cameras who then interviewed that person coming off the podium. They couldn't do it in Philadelphia, because they weren't on the podium in Philadelphia. And instead the Republicans were featuring such people as Elizabeth Dole. Now that's great, that advantages Bush -- doesn't do much for the congressional or senatorial candidates.
DOYLE McMANUS: The speech as a speech. I think it was the speech of Al Gore's life. Was it good enough? It won't bring him over the top, an awful lot rides on debates. TERENCE SMITH: Okay; Marty Kaplan? MARTIN KAPLAN: I think the expectations were so low that boredom was inevitable, that Al Gore sailed mightily above that. TERENCE SMITH: You're brutal, but true. All right. Thank you all three very much. |
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KATHLEEN
HALL JAMIESON: It occurred in all the major speeches. Bill Clinton signals
it in a paragraph that starts most important, and he says: "Republicans
want to spend every dime of our projected surplus and then some on tax
cuts leaving nothing for education, et cetera." Lieberman says
in a sentence that begins, "this is a question of priorities."
Our opponents want to use America's hard-earned surplus to give a tax
break to those who need it least, at the expense of our other needs.
And in a sentence in a speech that also has a pointing characteristic,
that is, it's telling you, I'm important, Al Gore says, "but let
me say it plainly: I will not go along with a huge tax cut for the wealthy
at the expense of everyone else." That's the message I expect that's
going to get through from the convention. 
MARTIN
KAPLAN: I think he did an excellent job, and the Democrats acquitted
themselves awfully well. I think that by contrast with the Republican
convention, I think what Bush needed to do was to accomplish the impression
of gravitas-- I am up to the job, I'm not an empty suit-- and instead,
what he wanted to convey was, eight years' squandered opportunity. I
don't think Americans connected to that narrative. When they think back
over the problems of the last eight years, squandered opportunity I
don't think is what comes to mind.
KATHLEEN
HALL JAMIESON: Right. Then, Social Security-- "you keep talking
about how you've got this plan that's going to help people invest their
own money. We don't see how you're going to handle the financial transaction
cost." If the Bush campaign can stay at a level of abstraction,
it wins the election. If Gore can fight this election on the details
of policy, he pushes it into an entirely different domain, consistent
with that theme, "what are we going to do with the surplus? Then
the message has to be in the details, and the details are, Democratic
social agenda versus Republican tax cuts. 
TERENCE
SMITH: That's, of course, the key word. Marty Kaplan, he had an interesting
mix, both -- in fact, the whole convention did -- between the positive
and the negative. What did you think of that? 
KATHLEEN
HALL JAMIESON: One of the things that I argue in the book "Everything
You Think You Know About Politics and Why You're Wrong," is that
we should stop using the word "negative," because the public's
definition of negative and the pundit's definition don't agree at all.
The public realizes that attack is a legitimate part of discourse, but
it doesn't want personal attack, and that's why you haven't seen it
in these two conventions. It doesn't want hyperbolic attack, and you've
certainly seen a lower level of hyperbole this year. It wants contrast:
"I will do, he will do." We've seen an increase in that this
year. And it loves attack that is couched in humor-- hence, in a major
move in the Lieberman speech, which is not a hard-edged attack, one
of the most telling lines, which ordinarily would have phrased as "trickle
down economics, that's them," you have "they think the way
to get food to the birds is to feed the horses more oats." And
it takes a moment. You almost hear the "ta-dum" where the
audience realizes exactly what he said, but it's funny. And so what
you have is, I think, a profile of this year that we can explain by
looking at what the public has said to the process about political discourse.
It's said, "we'd like attacks that are relevant to us on significant
issues, not personal or hyperbolic, that tell us where you're going
to be, too." 
DOYLE
McMANUS: Beginning with Bill Clinton nostalgia night on Monday. And
then finally last night, Gore being allowed to present his own synthesis.
I think that's right, and in the short run, that probably was a difficulty
for the Democrats. You know, the Republicans had four days. They arrived
in Philadelphia, they knew exactly what they wanted to say. As one of
them told me, "we've all taken our medication." They were
all on message from day one. Well, if the Republican convention was
one beautiful scripted infomercial, this was more like reality TV, with
the hand-held mini-cam and a couple of strange jumps and cuts, which
made it much more fun to watch, but may have delivered kind of a mixed
message. Now, as Kathleen suggests, the rest of this campaign from the
Democratic side is going to be contrast, contrast, contrast -- trying
to pull people's attention to those issues, and that will really be
the proof of whether this works or not. 
TERENCE
SMITH: Doyle, just a final word, maybe both of you, on the speech as
a speech.