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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Political Pulse: Leaving His Mark (June 15, 2004) Ronald Reagan's legacy belongs to the whole country, not just one political party. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: The Torture Memos: Putting the President Above the Law (June 15, 2004) Little did the Framers suspect that their Constitution would be twisted by a president to claim powers more appropriate to Roman emperors, Russian czars, King George III. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Wealth of Nations: Reagan Defeated Communism. Washington Was More of a Challenge. (June 15, 2004) Ronald Reagan sped the birth of a new world order, but he failed to change what he wanted to change the most: the scale and reach of the federal government. By Clive Crook. Media: It Pays to Be Wrong (June 8, 2004) The news business only pretends to be wary of byline hounds known to sometimes play it fast and loose. By William Powers. Political Pulse: Super-Charged Electorate (June 8, 2004) Back in 2000, voters didn't get energized until after the election. This year, the opposite is true. By William Schneider. Social Studies: In Iraq, Don't Cut And Run. Cut and Don't Run. (June 8, 2004) The biggest mistake America could make in Iraq would be not to try for democracy there. The second-biggest mistake might be to try too hard. By Jonathan Rauch. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Missing a Beat
Political reporters always had a hard time getting a handle on Ronald Reagan's charisma. by William Powers ..... Reagan Week is finally drawing to a close, and at first blush it seems the media have told us everything we'd ever want to know about the ex-president, plus a lot we didn't want to know. I personally could have pressed on happily without the Bela Lugosi headline I saw in the online edition of The Times of London: "Reagan Rose From Coma for Last Look at Nancy." (Though it's headed straight for my ever-expanding So-Awful-It's-Excellent collection and so was not completely without value.) Indeed, the week was barely a few days old, and Reagan's body was still in California, when rueful complaints about the saturation coverage started appearing. Dan Rather even lamented to The Philadelphia Inquirer's television columnist, Gail Shister, that the funeral events would be "over-covered," and he did so several days before those events, featuring Dan Rather himself, actually occurred. Amazing prescience! How fitting that the nation's first truly post-modern president, the master of the scripted unscripted moment, should be the subject of a pre-emptively regretted media binge. Yet for all the excess, there was a missing piece, a crucial element of the Reagan story that has never been well explained, and perhaps never will be. In fact, I think one of the reasons we went so over-the-top at Reagan's death is that there's a part of him that few in the media have ever understood well, and fewer still knew how to cover, though it drove him to the presidency and was responsible for the immense popularity we witnessed this week. So we go to these somewhat ridiculous lengths, spilling millions of words, woo-wooing over every remotely "iconic" Reagan image we can lay our hands on, trying to make up for our inadequacy. I'm talking about Reagan's charisma. Yes, it's the most obvious part of him, and yes, it was mentioned, referenced, alluded to, chatted about, and glossed upon countless times this week. It seems simple enough—the man was magnetic, charming, soothing, likeable. But try to really get your arms around this part of Reagan, beyond these thin adjectives. Try to describe the precise transaction that occurred in the '80s between Reagan and the American public, and continues today, years after he left public life and even now after he's gone. Charisma has a bad name in the media. It's squishy and suspect, part of the Character Journalism category that various media prudes feel journalists should avoid like a bad infection, especially when it comes to politicians. Charisma is inextricably linked in our minds to entertainment, the dreaded industry all self-respecting political hacks want no part of (unless they get a chance to sell an article or a book to the movies, in which case entertainment suddenly becomes temporarily rather OK). It's fine to talk about the charisma of a Brad Pitt or a Julia Roberts. They're just movie stars, and the journalists who cover them are, in the media's own rigid hierarchical reckoning, barely journalists at all. Charisma is cheesy. It's very Elvis, very Princess Diana. It's for people who read the supermarket tabs and believe in astrology. Political reporters are above all that. Political reporters are supposed to care about concrete real-world stuff like polls, war chests, swing states, and, of course, the issues. What political reporters are definitely not supposed to care about, not too much anyway, is the charisma of political figures—the strange personal magnetism that allows certain rare people like Ronald Reagan to capture the public's imagination and affection—even though this magnetism wins more votes than any policy position ever could, and even though it can, as Reagan showed and we saw all over again this week, change history. That Reagan was a Hollywood celebrity, and had the charisma that goes with that trade, caused a lot of media people to deeply underestimate him, when he was running for president and afterwards. That old movie star—what could he do? Oh, the endless jokes about Bedtime for Bonzo. Few people in the media do charisma at all, and fewer still do it well. Washington Post columnist Tom Shales is one of the exceptions. He turned in a Reagan appreciation this week with several nice turns on the charisma theme, though he never used the word. "Reagan had good speechwriters, for sure," Shales wrote, "but the delivery always glorified the material rather than the other way around." Later, discussing the current President Bush, Shales observed: "The gap between him and Ronald Reagan—in terms of stature, speaking ability, and overall presidentiality—is gargantuan." "Presidentiality"—an awkward, interesting word. It should be a staple of presidential coverage, the way polls and fundraising are staples. There should be a charisma beat, on which reporters would delve into presidentiality, perform deep readings of each candidate's television presence, public aura, and personal likeability, and tell the public how these things work. It's one thing to swoon over a charismatic politician; it's another to know why you're swooning, and to keep this in mind when you vote. In Grace and Power, the penetrating new book on the Kennedy White House by biographer (and former New York Times media reporter) Sally Bedell Smith, there's a memorable charisma moment. Chuck Spalding, one of John Kennedy's friends—and a former Hollywood screenwriter—recalls Kennedy asking him, "Why did [Gary] Cooper draw a crowd?" Kennedy, Spalding continues, "was always interested in seeing whether he had it—the magnetism—or didn't have it." Reagan certainly had it. Won't someone please tell us what it was?
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2004 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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