THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 87-92
© 2001 National Communication Association 

Rod Hart: The Most Optimistic Man in America

 J. Michael Hogan

 Roderick P. Hart. Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good For Us.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.  xvii + 309 pages. $32.50. 

In 1996, Bob Dole campaigned as “the most optimistic man in America.”   That, as it turned out, was a lie.  Not only did Dole actually use less optimistic language than most presidential candidates, but he obviously had not met Rod Hart.  In Campaign Talk, Hart declares that presidential campaigns are good for us, that they generally have “served the nation well,” and that there is even reason for “celebrating political campaigns” (xiv).  Before proclaiming Hart delusional, we should note that he also documents many of the shortcomings of today’s campaigns.  Yet in the spirit of the “contrarian,” Hart hopes to redeem an electoral process that, in his view, has been trivialized and undervalued.

Hart begins Campaign Talk “by offering a prayer: that when reflecting on campaigns we avoid feeling above politics or beyond politics or against politics or without politics” (22).  For Hart, politics is the science of social cooperation, and to reflect only upon the defects of campaigns seems cramped.  Reviewing the critical literature, he hopes to call into question many of the common criticisms of campaigns and to emphasize instead their avowedly positive functions.  What really distinguishes his perspective, however, is the assumption that what is said during campaigns really matters.  According to Hart, this is not a common assumption, at least among scholars who “do not know what to do with campaign texts and hence look to polling data for their truths” (17).

Hart specifically addresses such scholars in his second chapter.   Defending the book’s premise that words are important, Hart discusses a number of studies familiar to readers of this journal, all investigating language as an instrument of power.  He then introduces his database of campaign texts and the computer program that analyzed them: his so-called DICTION program.  One obvious virtue of the book is its grounding in the Campaign Mapping Project, an ambitious effort directed by Hart and Kathleen Jamieson to collect the speeches, spot ads, debates, news stories, and letters-to-the-editor produced during presidential campaigns from 1948 to the present.  Less obvious, perhaps, are the virtues of DICTION, the dictionary-based program that counted and categorized the words in those texts.  DICTION is, as Hart concedes, a rather crude tool of content analysis that treats words as meaningful stripped free of their context.  But by hovering farther out and surveying political discourse from what Hart characterizes as an “aerial perspective,” DICTION presumably lets us see “things in-the-large”--the patterns, trajectories, and trends of campaign discourse.          

In chapter 3, Hart begins sketching his “aerial” view of campaign discourse by posing two questions:  “What has changed in American political discourse?”  “What has stayed the same?”   Beginning with the latter question, Hart reports that he found no significant change in the use of religious references in campaigns between 1948 and 1996, nor did DICTION reveal any decline in patriotic language or the language of cooperation and community.  God, country, and community, Hart concludes, remain the constants of American political rhetoric.  The changes, on the other hand, are more subtle: a decline in the language of “certainty,” increased “personalization,” and increased “complexity,” or a decline in the use of familiar words along with a more crowded political agenda.  As Hart summarizes this latter change: “Homespun is out, technocratic in; the pressures of time goad us constantly; politics is not about one or two things but about many things” (74). 

In chapter 4, Hart examines several more specific functions served by campaigns.   According to Hart, campaigns perform an “immediacy function” by forcing presidents to return to the people periodically and address them in more personal and direct tones.  Campaigns also serve a “dialectical function” by casting incumbents and challengers in clearly distinct, oppositional roles, “the former casting a broad net, refusing to become caught up in particulars, the latter asking if the nation cannot do better” (90).  Third, campaigns serve a “renewal” function when candidates not immersed in Washington politics, mostly state governors, bring more “experiential,” “communal,” and “idealistic” language to the national dialogue.  Governors are indeed more “provincial,” Hart suggests, and “therein lies their appeal”: they speak to the “gritty realities” of politics and “narrow the gap between national and local politics” (93-95).   Finally, campaigns perform a “centripetal function” by encouraging linguistic conformity rather than distinctiveness.   Examining how various candidates differed from the norm on DICTION’s various dimensions, Hart discovered that the successful candidates were not those with the most innovative or distinctive rhetoric, but rather those, like Ronald Reagan, who spoke a thoroughly plain and centrist style. 

In chapter 5, Hart investigates the purposes and functions of three campaign forums:  convention addresses, political debates, and political advertising.  Each, he discovers, engages the electorate and performs important functions, even as he concedes that all are profoundly imperfect.  At the conventions, acceptance speeches have gotten longer over the years, and “they have also become less assured, as the candidates search for political stabilities that are now hard to find” (115).  Yet in telling the story of a nation whose citizens “both do and do not get along with one another,” they “ask the nation to do better”–and that, according to Hart, is a “great and good thing” (116). Debates likewise have their shortcomings, but they also perform unique and positive functions: they are “comparatively sober, comparatively focused, comparatively plainspoken, comparatively self-risking encounters with some potential to create genuine dialogue” (126).   Political ads–the most vilified of all campaign forums–are, according to Hart, complex despite their brevity and provide certain benefits that generally have gone unappreciated.  They “often have inspiring themes,” they “place new items on the national agenda,” and they “provide a way for candidates to deal with complex, or touchy, issues” (139).   Singularly, each of these “campaign forums” may be imperfect, Hart concludes, but together they create “a kind of national conversation” that can “make the overall campaign productive for the citizenry” (139).

In the sixth chapter, Hart explores how the rhetoric of presidential candidates differs from other types of discourse.  He finds the language of politicians more optimistic, more grounded, and more “relationally concerned” than that of either the press or the people, and he discovers more “realism” and “self-reference” in the political voice than in the rhetoric of corporate advocacy, religious preachment, or social protest.  Hart also discovers significant differences between Democrats and Republicans.  The Democratic style is a rhetoric of narrative grounded in people’s experiences, while the Republican style is a rhetoric of icons, featuring inspirational, patriotic, and religious references.  In other words, Democrats are “compassionate empiricists” while Republicans are “philosophical patriots” (167).   Those differences, however, have been diminishing in recent years.

In chapter 7, Hart focuses on the news media, asking such basic questions as: What is news?  Are the news media fulfilling their traditional mandate of objectivity?  And what distinguishes print media from broadcast media?   Many will likely find Hart’s answers unsatisfying; because news is a complicated text, he writes, one can find enough data “to support anyone’s theory of political news” (197).  Hart does confirm some rather obvious characteristics of journalistic rhetoric: it is skeptical and negative, it dramatizes events, and it is highly interpretive.  Beyond that, he finds no evidence of partisan bias, and he insists that print and broadcast news differ in important ways, even as they follow the same basic script.    Hart concludes that the media are not as bad as some claim, for people supposedly find politics more interesting because of journalistic dramatizations, and they look to journalists to explain “what it means that something happened” (183).  Indeed, Hart proclaims journalists “heroes” for pontificating from up high: “They reach each day into the buzzing confusion of the world and extract a shard of evidence.  Then they mount their Olympus to get some perspective on it and ultimately issue a guess as to what it means” (186).  

In chapter 8, Hart reflects on the voice of “the people,” as manifested in a large sample of letters-to-the-editor.  Discovering an “eerie constancy” to the people’s voice, Hart reports a number of not-so-surprising characteristics of letter-writers.  They are “scolds,” he notes, typically taking up pen to complain, yet they remain “much more positive than the press, often ending their letters with policy recommendations” (206).  They are the children both of Thomas Paine--“firebrands-cum-idealists”–and of Jesus, “never completely ruling out the possibility of salvation” (207).  In sharp contrast to journalists, they often invoke religious and patriotic terms, and they invoke basic values effortlessly and often injunctively in their discourse.  They are not as sure of themselves as journalists, but their language is far more upbeat; it is “often castigatory,” but “rarely depressive” (212).   In the “people’s voice,” presidential campaigns are not mere “horse races,” but rather represent important national debates about fundamental and enduring values.

In his conclusion, Hart insists that “the data” caused him to fundamentally rethink presidential campaigns.   “Given the tremendous amount of data that has passed before my eyes in this study,” he writes, “I now find it hard to cavil or criticize nonchalantly.  Each time I confronted a disturbing campaign trend I quickly confronted another more propitious one, and this double-going made me question matters I had thought settled” (228).  Reiterating some of the useful functions served by campaigns, he reminds us “that a political campaign is an extended conversation among three voices–the candidates, the press, and the people”–and he urges us to embrace rather than resist the “inevitable, democratic tension” created by those voices (232).  Trying to “fix” campaigns, he suggests, is both futile and unnecessary, for such efforts rest upon the faulty assumption that campaigns need fixing.  “For a number of reasons,” Hart  concludes, “I do not believe that campaigns must be changed dramatically or that they will be” (242).  After all, the “American style of campaigning has reliably produced the intended result–a new president of the United States” (236).

Yet the fact that presidential campaigns have reliably produced a secession of warm bodies to occupy the White House hardly seems sufficient warrant for abandoning all efforts at reform.  Hart’s own data show the trivialization and degradation of campaign discourse by the politics of personality and the rhetoric of horse race journalism.  In addition, his study of “the people’s voice” adds to the already abundant evidence refuting the myth that the politicians and the press are only “giving the people what they want.”  Steadfastly consistent in their view that presidential politics ought to be about large, enduring questions of value and policy, the public we hear from in Campaign Talk is the same public revealed by most survey research: a public disillusioned and angered by a political process that they believe has been corrupted by big money, sleazy political consultants, and arrogant celebrity journalists.  Hart’s “contrarian” approach provides a welcome corrective to a literature dominated by cynical debunking, and his wit, eloquence, and erudition make Campaign Talk a pleasure to read.   Yet does he really believe that “we cannot do better and that we need not do better” (xvi)?  Would he really have us abandon all efforts at campaign reform?

Writing well before the 2000 election, Hart confidently predicted that America’s third “turn-of-the-century” presidential campaign would not produce what the first two produced: a “magnificent president.”   “A new Jefferson or Roosevelt cannot be found today,” he wrote, “because they can no longer be imagined” (xiv) In a limited sense, campaigns still produce the “intended result,” and Hart may be right that “even a boisterous and ill-tempered discussion cannot fail as long as it never ends” (xiv).   But today’s media circuses not only fail to produce magnificent presidents, they scare the best potential leaders away from politics altogether.  Worse yet, they lead to distress, disillusionment, and self-disenfranchisement among large numbers of citizens, especially young people.  Surely we should not stop trying to imagine how they might be fixed.  

J. Michael Hogan is Professor and Graduate Officer in the Department of Speech Communication at the Pennsylvania State University