Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency

6. The Message in Hand

170 Six The Message in Hand That politicians can sway audiences through gesture is an old conceit, as the writings of the first-century Roman rhetorician Quintilian, for instance, attest. Quintilian offered copious advice on how orators should use their hands and manage their bodies, and made it sound as if these signs had stable meanings and predictable effects: “To strike the thigh, a gesture which Cleon is supposed to have first practiced at Athens, is not only common, but suits the expression of indignant feeling and excites theattentionoftheaudience”(Book11:374).Thecontemporaryscholarly literature on gesture has had precious little to say about this venerable subject, and what has been said has been eclipsed by a mass of op-edstyled musings by journalists and political commentators, with the occasional cameo played by the more sober, if often dubiously trained, “body language expert.” These musings range from the waggish (e.g., a shot at Sen. John McCain’s “twitchy finger air quotes” [Muller 2008]) to the incendiary (e.g.,accusationsthatObamaslylyflippedoff HillaryClintonin April 2008 when he scratched his cheek with his middle finger [Malcolm 2008]). And there’s always ample satire, like the Huffington Post’s Matt Mendelsohn’spiecefromlateOctober2008,whichpokedfunatMcCain’s proclivity for air quotes: “McCain Injures Fingers Making Quotation Marks Sign, Suspends Campaign.” “Today,” complains Jürgen Streeck in one of the few, careful case studies of political gesture, “most publicized pronouncementsonthematterhavethequalityofpoppsychologyorpop The Message in Hand | 171 ethology: Unconscious motives or psychological dispositions are attributed , often on the basis of a single photograph, and universal meanings of isolated behaviors are invoked, in statements that are sometimes witty, but rarely enlightening” (2008, 155). These musings belong to an industry of media commentary in which no facet of candidate behavior is safe from scrutiny, for, as we have seen, even verbal slips and gaffes can be treated as signs revelatory of character , thoughts, and machinations. Apply this to gesture, and the result is a caricatured version of a familiar view, “that gesture ‘leaks,’ betraying a speaker’s true feelings and thoughts, perhaps in opposition to more treacherous (because more conscious?) words which may try to conceal them” (Haviland 2006, 67). If anything, the commentariat’s relentless pursuit of deep meanings betrays something about its own dispositions: its suspicion that candidates are opaque, dissimulated creatures whose signals, like public-relations copy and clever ads—caveat emptor!—demand critical readings, so that consumer-voters can see who candidates “really” are and make informed, market-driven choices. How does gesture figure into Message craft? Rather than treat candidate gestures as if they were direct, unmediated expressions of Message, letusfollowthelong,sinuoussemioticpathwaysthatrunfromco-speech gesturetocandidatebrand.WewilltracejustafewofBarackObama’sgestures , beginning with an off-Message moment from the first Democratic primary debate in April 2007 and ending with an on-Message moment from the first presidential debate against Republican nominee John McCain in October 2008. Through this exercise in gestural exegesis, we shall see that gesture cannot directly index candidate brand, although it can participate in projects of candidate branding in complex ways. Looking Sharp: Barack Obama’s PrecisionGrip Gestures (2007–2008) Barack Obama did not look sharp at all in the first Democratic primary debate of 2007. The debate was held in South Carolina on 26 April and featured eight candidates and the two moderators, Brian Williams (NBC News) and David Stanton (Columbia, South Carolina’s WIS News). A 172 | Creatures of Politics question about terrorism tripped Obama up. As described in chapter 1, Williams had presented a hypothetical scenario in which another 9/11-style attack occurs while the current debate is in progress, and asked how he would respond. Obama got the question first. Senator Obama, if God forbid a thousand times we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of Al Qaida. How would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result? Obama’s response: Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans. And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack. The second thing is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, a., to find out that we don...