But I do know better, plenty better, mainly because all day I’m surrounded the facts of his negligence and the shameful conditions that many Texans still live in. Thanks to my job, which is unusual by any standard, I have the benefit of knowing not to believe the Governor’s ads and the reasons he offers for you to vote for him. The obvious problem is that few voters have such a resource, not to mention the time or interest to devote to it.

Non-wonks and other normal human beings do have some tools that can prove to be quite sufficient in advising their political decisions. The most important of which, and the one I will explore here, is the knowledge, to put it metaphorically, that there is a difference between the actor and the playwright.

Bush’s speech was outstanding, no doubt. Inspiring, clever, passionate, clear, and well-structured, it had every necessary feature of great oratory. My question while watching it, though, was, "Why does he keep looking out into the crowd with a look of desperate seeking? Why is he so obviously trying to see how this stuff is playing with the people?" After he delivered a certain line, he would instantly cast a countenance of trial-ballooning out into the audience, as if to say, "Did that work?" It occurred to me that either Bush is more insecure than we have been told he is, or that he was merely mouthing the words that came from someone’s else’s heart and mind.

I am in no position to question Bush’s self-esteem, and I suspect that no one is totally secure in themselves, so it is a moot inquiry. But the second possibility seems very likely. We know that he and every other politician and major public figure has some hired gun to craft the public addresses, some talented wordsmith who could sell a blind man glasses. Many professional speech-writers are novelists or screenwriters in their other life. Their talent, for ill or good, is to get our pathos riled up, to engage our sense of drama and excitement, and most importantly, to get us to jump on the bandwagon. That’s their job, and they’re good at it.

In fact, modern televised politics has almost eliminated individual competence from the political process. Rarely does a public figure have to say or do anything without the support and coaching of a small army of well-paid experts. The elected is merely the messenger, the puppet who moves his mouth. The message is cooked up over the course of months or years by a skilled group of rhetorical alchemists and pollsters. Appearances, even the "spontaneous" ones, are carefully planned and controlled. Even debate settings, which one would think would be the solitary place where a person is really exposed, stripped of their speeches and handlers, have proven to be extremely malleable by advanced PR techniques. The most resilient of all these is the damnable "staying on message" technique. The theory of this approach is no matter the question, give the same answer. No deviate, no problem. "Staying on message" is a desperate response by handlers to a very real fear that the puppet may try to say something on his own, and thereby run the wagon into a ditch (see Dan Quayle, Ronald Reagan, among others.)

Our habit of being attracted to famous people such as actors and relatives of other celebrities for political office is derivative of this truth. We at least subconsciously know that all an elected official has to do is read the stuff in an entertaining manner and have a good team of helpers to actually run the show, and everything will be okay. The campaign and primary process is really an audition to see who’s the most convincing actor. How funny that the Oscar’s are handed out only a few weeks after Super Tuesday.

The possibilities for cynicism on this subject are boundless, as well as for a certain amount of resignation. However, these conclusions and admonitions are not mere groundless opinions or surrenders to elite power, but reasonable deductions from real observations that anyone could see and attest to. There are few exceptions to the above patterns, and the more entrenched in a political party and money a candidate is, the more likely we are to see the politics of theater.

I believe that Americans have a gut level reaction to such displays, which makes them pine for sincerity and the much-ballyhooed "authenticity." Authenticity is difficult to square with televisual representation, if not an absolute contradiction. But even John McCain, Alan Keyes, Bill Bradley, and Gary Bauer were perceived as more real than the top-dogs in their parties, perhaps because they knew from the outset they had nothing to lose and didn’t have to act very hard. Gore and Bush have learned to fake authenticity par excellence; congratulations, your Oscar is waiting.

Is there a way out? Only in the act of watching, because few if any of us experience campaigning in person. Virtually all of our political experience happens through television (that’s a very sobering thought, come to think of it). Therefore, we must first become aware that our knowledge and feelings about a candidate or race are filtered through the mass media, and carried on in front of cameras for an audience, and the audience is us. We must recognize that a large part of all this is theater, and we must develop the same kind of critical distance that we use to watch professional wrestling. Clearly, this makes us prone to even more cynicism. The difference is that Stone Cold Austin can’t raise or lower your taxes or put your son on the battlefield. Politics really matters.

At the very least though, we should understand that the speech you hear today on TV was not carefully and tenderly tooled by that candidate himself, a la Lincoln writing the Gettysburg Address on his stovepipe hat. Those speeches should be heard, reflected upon, and the speech writer complimented. Wait and then later read about what the candidate really wants to do with the country.  

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