The venue has lately become more intimate - almost conversational - compared to that which
McLuhan trashed during the Ford-Carter runoff. The initial debates this season, Republican and Democrat, with umpteen candidates at podiums reflect what McLuhan called "the most stupid arrangement of any in the history of debating." So how much has been learned by the producers of civic affairs after 32 years?One recent Obama-Clinton debate presented a conversation each candidate had in parallel with a media questioner. This is far from the conversation McLuhan urged on Brokaw and Newman in 1976, but it had its moments. Obama was the most conversational, listening, pausing, considering, modulating his voice, and shaping his answers "to order." He was very cool, in the sense of presenting an incompleteness that invited watchers to fill in the pauses, provide the deeper meaning, and read into the message. The viewer became involved with his image. Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, hot personalities neither of whom understand television, proclaimed his appeareance to have been less powerful (hot?) than the speeches he gives at rallies. This is a mistake of personal identification. He does not behave like them, Hillary does.
Clinton, by comparison, has no media helpers competent to tell her how ridiculously hot she is on TV. She broadcasts, you listen. Your conversation is a triggering device that produces a canned oration. There are just enough pauses for nods of agreement. The tone is hectoring and monotonous, the rhythm a throbbing disco pulse, and she reminds one of the party bore who commandeers any lull in conversation. The answers she rattles off hardly matter any more now than in the 1976 debates McLuhan watched; for the viewer it's about the image projected and what the medium is doing to her. Viewers saw someone who had nothing to hear, consider, or revise, who had come from the mountaintop with tablets to break over their noggins should there be signs of a golden calf. "I'm a fighter!" she repeatedly barked.
Take that, dreamers. Democrats liked it.
On the night of this particular debate, Fox, which was not broadcasting it, was running a Democratic focus group of 40 or 50 members who were observing the broadcast. Independents and Republicans were excluded. Strapped into their seats, a tiny minority of self-admitted Hillary supporters grew and grew until by the end, the Democratic focus group was overwhelmingly pro-Clinton. Hillary's hotness, to this group, was endearing. So it is possible McLuhan was wrong in part - here, at least hot Hillary, a Hillary at odds with the medium conveying her essence, captured Democratic hearts.
We can mislead ourselves here in mistaking the way people watch TV. The random Democrat is not strapped into a chair for the duration but bloweth where the wind listeth, be that the fridge, the bathroom, the phone, or the stove. The average viewer, in a state of curious detachment, is confronted with this high energy mania on one side, and a lower, cooler, sympatico energy level (Obama's) on the other.
In general, however, cool seems to work better on the Republican side and with independents. The "coolest" media property appears to have won the GOP nomination and consistently polls better against hotter-than-hell Hillary. The rap on McCain's personal style, in fact, is that he occasionally gets too "intense" - a marvelous window into Republican and conservative issues of comportment.
Picture Bill Buckley on Firing Line with any radical guest. He's leaning waay back in his chair and talking slower than normal. Remember?
In the primaries, even such potentially "hot" characters as Giuliani came across consistently as cool, responsive, thoughtful, "interactive." The hottest Republican of all, Allan Keyes, was excluded from the debates entirely and seems not to have been missed. The next hottest, Ron Paul, was not competitive. Of the three leading candidates, Romney's style was hottest (relatively) and he is gone. Cool rules, message be damned. Or more properly, image being the message.
Compared with the Democrats, in the Republican debates, you had a cluster of generally cool candidates. On the Democrat side, it was all hotness all the time, listen up dammit, with even Obama playing that game in that earlier phase. But Obama deployed a mass speaking style that was as cool as that format allows. And now that debates are "personal," he can take his experiments in coolness to the limits of another medium.
We have the hottest of Democrats now contending with the coolest. Who will win?
Applying the McLuhan paradigm, Republican and Democratic voters are telling us a lot about themselves as media consumers.
