Chapter 1 - Performance at the Core of Representative Democracy

Summary

The question of a politician's skill as a performer is a frequently debated one. Some politicians – among US presidents and presidential candidates notably Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama – have been lauded as naturally gifted orators. Others, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and John McCain for instance, have been maligned for their lacklustre acting ability or, conversely, it is asserted in their defence that politicians should not have to be good performers in the first place. This argument is easily inverted, too: Bill Clinton's long-time nickname ‘slick willie’, for instance, was coined by Arkansas journalist Paul Greenberg in 1980, who explains that ‘slick willie’ does not mean lying so much as dissembling, the telling of ‘a very lawyerly, sophisticated, elastic lie’, and the tendency to get away with waffling and obfuscating rather than holding fast to one's core principles (Merida 1998). ‘Slick willie’ refers to what people perceived to be Clinton's duplicitous ability to weasel himself out of any disadvantageous situation. It implicitly casts Clinton's virtuosic improvisation skills as a negative (Ryan 2013). David Foster Wallace's essay (2006) on John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign implies a similar kind of distrust associated with politicians’ ability to give suave and seamless performances. Wallace details how, in contrast to other politicians, he welcomed McCain's obvious discomfort with prepared speeches and his strong preference for conversational townhall formats of audience engagement, both of which inclined the novelist to trust McCain more than other politicians. While public performance is understood to be an essential skill for contemporary politicians, at the same time it is one that is viewed with a great deal of suspicion.

This long-standing suspicion of politicians’ performances has been interpreted as an expression of the antitheatrical prejudice – the ambivalence towards acting, performance, and the theatre and association of the same with duplicity, manipulation, and moral breakdown, which reaches all the way back to Plato's Republic ([c. 380 bce] 1968). For Plato, the theatre was liable to corrupt actors, since he supposed imitating less than virtuous characters would lead actors themselves to take on these characters’ less than virtuous characteristics; mimesis corrupts because ‘those who imitate tend to become what they imitate’ (Barish 1981, 21).