The Untrained Ear

Shelby Steele’s insightful and incisive piece on Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal as a “bargainer” candidate — a candidate who offers whites racial innocence, and blacks the opportunity to “document the end of inferiority” — bears reading. One of the corollaries to the “bargainer” concept that Steele discusses is the power, and the pitfalls, of being a “blank screen”:

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don’t know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . .” And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama’s Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a “blank screen.”

It is this last quality — the blank screen — that is a critical factor in the rapid ascendance, and, typically, the subsequent meteoric fall, of many political candidates. I view these types of candidates more as “Rorschach” candidates, because their value is in what they show about the desires and drivers of their supporters, moreso than in what the candidates themselves represent.

Before Barack Obama, for example, there was a non-candidate on the other side: Colin Powell. For those young readers of this blog, Mr. Powell was a prominent military figure in the elder Bush administration, before he became Secretary of State in the younger Bush administration.

There arose the “Draft Colin Powell” movement, around 1995, because people were dissatisfied with the establishment candidates, and Powell had an aura of gravitas, and had apparently executed his military duties competently and intelligently.

Little was known about his politics. Accordingly, people, knowing little about the man politically but respecting what they had seen personally, assumed that Powell shared their positions. People will often see a few pegs of similarity with another person and hang an entire set of assumptions about that person from them.

This leads to an extremely precarious situation when the candidate starts to gain traction. When so little is known about a candidate’s positions but so much is assumed, one misstep creates a jarring cognitive dissonance in voters’ minds that can create a sense of betrayal and a degree of “blowback” that can be difficult, if not impossible, from which to recover.

Powell’s “candidacy” never really took off, in part because some of his public statements started people questioning whether he really did represent what they hoped he did. In the same way, candidates often test worse against “any [Democrat/Republican]” in polls than they do against any particular, identified candidate of the opposing party — because the identified candidates have flaws of which people are aware, while the undefined candidates are idealized images in the minds of those being polled.

That is why Obama’s “Jeremiah Wright Moment” is particularly hazardous for the candidate, and, in a YouTube age, will be a very extended one. Once someone has added outlines and color to the inkblot that makes it look like a particular picture, it is very difficult to recover the artful ambiguity that allows people to read their subconscious hopes and aspirations into a candidate’s carefully generalized image. When a candidate deliberately avoids defining himself, he risks being defined by those with whom he associates.