Hyper-simplicity of another sort trashes rational voting: theatrical judgments. Nowadays, that shines out on television more stunningly than ever before. Quite naturally, citizens have for a long time thought they could judge best by what they saw. What one reads seems indirect and incomplete. What one hears is hearsay--potentially rumorous gossip. What one sees comes on as undeniable truth. There it is. And it is no accident that in business, candidates for jobs are interviewed in person, not just on the telephone. It is just as understandable why reporters bus-off to travel with a candidate, so they can not only hear him but see him. Candidates are now looked at long and hard, and judged as to how they seem to act on the public stage. No wonder then that a George Bush is coached to stand tall and straight out in front of the flag of America.
To suppose that a candidate is going to be the President he looks like is absurd. History shows how false that is, right down to the present. Warren G. Harding, after he died, was regularly rated the worst President ever, until Nixon became known. But he had been recruited decades in advance by a politician who looked at him and said, "Gee, what a good-looking President he'd make!" Harding looked like George Washington and came across speaking even better. William Allen White saw him as having an "actor's sharply chiseled face, with his graying hair and massive black eyebrows, with his matinee-idol manner, tiptoeing eagerly into a national limelight...."
Harding became a good-looking, bad-doing President. What he seemed to be was not what he was.
More recently, Ronald Reagan came on as what he was not: a competent, well-informed, sincere, and devoted leader. His visual and oral theatricality caught the public attention and shunted aside the truth about his political behavior. Hardly anyone focused in on his lies. When republican candidate Reagan was asked by the Washington Post, "What are you proudest of in your public career?", he answered that he had achieved "reform of welfare" in California. "which turned out to be the most comprehensive and successful reform of welfare that's ever been attempted in this country." He gave details and numbers.
Then, in a short time, California's republican state legislators completely refuted his statement--not with minor corrections, but with facts that the number of welfare recipients had not gone down 364,630, as Reagan said, but had nearly doubled upward in numbers during his governorship, and that his claim that he had saved "almost $2 billion" in welfare expense for taxpayers was false. The truth was that welfare costs had tripled, far beyond what they had been.
The simplicity of political theatrical appearance is a distortion we should not rely on in 1992 or anytime beyond.
Time is short for voters. Perhaps the least time they need to spend in assessing which potential President to vote for is to simply take note of who is ahead and automatically decide to vote for that one--whoever it is.
Polling is done much more often now than in the past. The mode of polling is often false: counting those who go for or against a stated paragraph and then falsely reporting that the respondent "said" some part of it. In campaign polling the respondent typically does not even have to name the one he or she prefers, simply choose among the contenders. Typically, "none of the above" is not a choice offered.
But despite all the uncertainties, the result of a poll is a statistic. That makes the fact seem definite, precise, reliable. Watching and listening to a debate, the citizen grows uncertain; but then, a bit later, out comes a poll saying which candidate "won." That can seem to be a definite bottom line. The only problem is that the statistic says nothing whatever about the qualifications of any potential President. Assigning decision to others via polls is a mode for the citizen to bypass responsibility and settle in on the perception of preference by others.
Those are three typical perversions of the voter's struggle to reason out which candidate ought to be President. The three simplifications are absurd. If you were considering marriage or hiring or major investment for some actual human being, how likely would it be that you would rely totally upon the person's reported morals or impressions or statistical comparisons? Instead, you would of course check out the candidate's real character, based on what he or she had already been and done. That is normal practice--but not in Presidential politics!
Studying Presidential characters in the 20th century, I came to an obvious method of choice: check out what the life experience of candidates can tell you about their probable character as President. The basic personality study came down to two essential variables: energy and emotion. Fundamental human adaptations lean toward activity or passivity in behavior, and positive or negative sentiment. The combinations of these relatively observable variables revealed essential operative attitudes.
Passive-negative Presidents such as Coolidge and Eisenhower, for example, service the White House like some king in a castle in the sky--raising themselves way up above mundane politics, which they delegate to others because they themselves dislike the operative earthly doings. They see politics as a momentarily painful duty to be endured, due only to high ethical responsibilities.
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