~~~~~~~~~

The Story of Polioptics is a 10-part Web narrative based on a multi-media presentation — POLIOPTICS: Political Influence Through Imagery, From George Washington to Barack Obama — that debuted on college campuses in 2009.

In Part 1 of the Story of Polioptics, we found ourselves in a hotel function room of the Hyatt Regency Trinidad. It was, to be sure, an odd place to start a discourse on the topic of the history of presidential stagecraft in the United States.

But a U.S. President had just arrived in the Caribbean for the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April, 2009, and that hotel function room was the first planned stop on a packed weekend schedule.  Remembering back to that first post, it seemed that before much more time elapsed in that overheated, overfilled room of hemispheric leaders, President Barack Obama, in one of his first forays overseas, might find himself in an interesting predicament.

Eight Polioptics posts ago, I promised we’d return to the place Jimmy Buffett called “the Island of the Spices” at the end of our story.  Our story has taken a few tangents through the history of presidential image making, and still has one post to go before we conclude. The goal has always been to entertain, and perhaps teach a thing or two, about how leaders in general, politicians in particular, and presidents to be precise, hone their images through techniques of production and advance work. Woven into this narrative are many of the techniques that are passed down from generation to generation of political operatives. In Trinidad, the old generation of operative met the new realities of presidential news coverage, and the challenges and complexities of controlling the message in the 21st Century came into stark focus.

Let’s remember, for a moment, where the narrative has taken us so far. Along the way during the Story of Polioptics, you’ve followed the arc of one dinosaur advance man: the unique images that shaped a political aesthetic; how those images affect subconscious perceptions in people generally; how Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan used imagery to great effect; how Bill Clinton raised the bar on production; how George W. Bush elevated it even further (and perhaps a bit too far); how the Internet transformed pop and politics and Barack Obama’s rise along with it; and, in the last post, how Obama transitioned his mastery of the campaign into changing how the White House presents itself.

And now we come back to Port of Spain.

I was standing on the periphery of the Friday night Leaders’ Reception at the Summit of the Americas trying, along with the rest of the aides present, to give the 34 heads of state and government their space.  Pete Souza, the White House photographer, stood nearby, his equipment in a protective “ready” position but not intending to make many shots in this less-than-regal environment.  The “reception”—if you could call it that—served as one big holding room of presidents and prime ministers, a logistical device to get the honored guests and their security and staff entourages into a secure space. This would let the thousand or so other invited guests be ushered into a larger ballroom where the Summit’s Opening Ceremonies would take place.

But in this large holding tank of national leaders schooling among their opposites, some had a history of following their own current.  One of them, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was, let’s say, unpredictable.

Preparing for my volunteer stint as the president’s lead advance representative to the Summit—the fifth in a series that stretched back to 1994 in Miami, when I was working in the White House full time as director of production—I studied how more-recent hemispheric gatherings had succeeded, or not.  At the 2005 Summit in Argentina, Chávez and soccer star Diego Maradona held a rally in a soccer stadium to protest the policies of the Bush Administration. Estimates put the crowd at 25,000. Addressing the outdoor assemblage, Chávez was full of invective. Maradona called Bush “human garbage.”  It was, to many, a summit in shambles.

Now, four years later, we arrived in Port of Spain expecting, in one way or another, Chávez to once again take the proceedings in an unknown direction.

International advance trips usually begin about a week before “the principal” (in this case, President Obama) arrives on Air Force One.  As the thinking goes among planners at the National Security Council and the State Department, it should leave more than enough time to iron out any details or potential snafus. After the advance work is done, and once the president touches down, it should be smooth sailing until the president is “wheels-up” a few hours or, in our case in Trinidad, a few days later.

That’s the hope, anyway.  When dealing with the Venezuelans, it’s not so easy.  On diplomatic visits like this, the lead advance person is often joined at the hip with an ambassador on the ground to attend myriad “walk throughs” of venues and oversee “countdown meetings” of the scores of support people including the staff of our our embassy in Trinidad, temporary added staff from the State Department, and contingents from the U.S. Secret Service, the White House Communications Agency, various other branches of the U.S. military, and so on.

Ambassador Charles Shapiro

In Trinidad, a career U.S. Ambassador — Charles Shapiro, a former Ambassador to both Trinidad and Venezuela — was temporarily assigned as the U.S. Charge  d’affaires for the Summit.  Charles is a superb diplomat and had seen how Chávez operated during his days at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas.  But how Chávez might behave in this, his first potential encounter with the new U.S. President, Barack Obama, was anybody’s guess. Neither Charles nor I had much luck peering up the Venezuelan’s sleeve during the several meetings of leaders’ representatives to review the proceedings for the upcoming summit. Some might have preferred Obama and Chávez keep their distance throughout the Friday-to-Sunday schedule.  If they never met, I figured, the trip could be labeled mission accomplished.  It was a naïve expectation, at best.

It didn’t take long for President Obama to put a wrench into that plan.  While I was sweating out the Leaders’ Reception, Obama played his characteristic role of cool customer.  The reception seemed to go well into overtime when, as usual, it took longer for volunteers from the host country to usher the audience to its seats.  The longer it took to get the Opening Ceremonies underway, the greater the chance that the two biggest fish in the room would pass each other, moved by the inevitable human rivulets that that always convey people through tight spaces.

At last, there was movement.  A few orders barked at elevated volume by the Trinidadian protocol staff signaled that they were ready to line the leaders up in reverse alphabetical order and troop them into the Opening Ceremonies.  (If you’ve ever watched an Olympics Opening Ceremony, you might have an idea of what was going on behind the scenes.)  At the Olympics, young athletes will behave like young athletes. At summits, world leaders will behave like world leaders. Backstage, they like to mingle. Then you get their attention, line them up, and send them out into the fully lit main event.

When I worked at the White House, this was always one of my favorite moments, played out on a number of continents. There I was, in my twenties, playing traffic cop to world leaders — Russian, Middle Eastern, Asia-Pacific, Western European, whatever — who routinely found themselves on the front pages of the world’s newspapers.  Depending on how much instruction you gave, how much choreography you orchestrated, and how you set up the press, the resulting choreography could create a compelling Page 1 shot.

But this was not one of those times when you direct the actors on the stage. We were guests in Port of Spain and this was not my show. The Trinis would have to figure out how to make the cattle call work.

In the reverse alphabetical lineup, Chávez, of Venezuela, was near the front of the line.  So too, I thought, would be the leader of the United States.  This could have been the moment that brought the two leaders together.  Then, I remembered, Spanish was the official language of this summit. That put President Obama, of Los Estados Unidos, near the back of the pack.  The Spanish language was the apparent road block standing in the way of a chance meeting.

The shot seen 'round the world

If only it could have been that easy.  Just then, Obama, from about thirty feet away, bee-lined toward Chávez.  My radar sensed imminent collision.  Few others in the room noticed what was happening. Perhaps they dismissed the notable moment about to occur, given that this reception was billed as “closed press.” Perhaps they accepted that national leaders, even of countries that publicly keep their distance, can often be cordial behind closed doors.

Closing in on Chávez, Obama extended his hand and said, without affect, “How are you?” Chávez turned — somewhat surprised as I saw it — and could only return the handshake.  Their right hands joined.  Obama put his left hand on Chávez’s shoulder.  Both men smiled.

A click of the camera captured a sense of warmth from both sides.

It was Obama’s initiative, but Chávez’s photographer.  No matter.  It still made history.  The technology that Pete Souza carries with him to upload a digital image isn’t the exclusive property of the United States.  The shot was instantly uploaded to every newspapers, blogs and computer screens around the world.

To some, the picture signaled another stop on what was being called Obama’s Apology Tour.  Dick Cheney called it “unhelpful.” Newt Gingrich said it “sends a terrible signal” about how the new administration regards dictators. To others, especially overseas, where the U.S. was trying to change its image after the Bush years, it was a stand-up moment in which America showed a willingness to put aside animosities toward its neighbors.

All because of an unscripted clasp before an anonymous photographer.  The two men could have talked for hours and not made as much news as they did in seconds.

That evening in my hotel room, I replayed in an instant, wired way, the same routine I had done hundreds of times in the Clinton years, only this time it was very different.

In the old days, after a big event, I would have a few beers in the hotel lobby with my fellow advance team members, and go to bed, hoping for one of those nights when your eyelids close and it seems like only a blink before dawn arrives. In the early morning, I would throw on jeans and a tee-shirt and race down to the nearest news stand or newspaper box to see the verdict on my event.  How did the picture look in the local paper?  In smaller media markets, they almost always played it big, dominating page 1 and filling several inside pages in the front section.

USA Today was always around in the old days. Maybe they would have a color shot on the front page.  And the big kahuna — The New York Times — how would photo editor Lonnie Schlein decide to portray the event?  To get the lowdown, a call back to the East Coast was usually required.  My colleagues at the White House would let me know how the images looked in the Washington Post and, because they always gave good space to photojournalism, how it played in the Washington Times as well.  A last call might have been home to friends in Boston, to see how the Globe covered it.  The Globe, which prided itself on its political coverage, often played Clinton photos big.  It might take a few days, or even a week, to see how, or if, the shot merited placement in Time, Newsweek or U.S. News & World Report. When we did make the weeklies, the full-color glossy pics were instant keepers in the scrap book.

How times have changed. In my hotel room in Port of Spain, one Google search of “Obama Chávez“ showed thousands of hits.  The picture was everywhere.  It only took a few minutes for the cable nets to begin ranting.  Within hours, the blogs started to weigh in.  In the hours after midnight, the national stories of the major newspapers were posted online.  Then the mainstream pundits took their turns.  Advance work, that time-honored political tradition in which young operatives work for days to orchestrate one “shot” that’s supposed to tell a larger story — of sacrifice, of history, of citizens doing their best or leaders doing their job — had evolved into something I didn’t recognize.  An event planned over many months was just feeding the media engine; creating a narrative for a few hours — or in this case, a few days — of spin and counter-spin.  On that evening, the “art of advance” turned into an assembly line of image.

The next morning, as we walked from his hotel room, I told the president the shot had gone global.  He was nonplussed. “I knew that photo would get around,” he told me.

I suppose that since that August evening in Boston, in 2004, when an Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama gave the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, he had become progressively more immune to the highs and lows of news coverage in the digital era.  What soars or crashes one day is often forgotten the next. New crises, or opportunities, take over the top-of-the-fold. How else could Obama endure the day-in, day-out marathon of performing the same political theater that now recycles itself every hour?  Obama had been tinged by Mayhill Fowler’s recording of his “bitter” comments at a fundraiser, but he had avoided the calamity that befell George Allen, Gordon Brown and even Helen Thomas, when their ill-considered comments were caught on tape.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbhPWAMx2y0

At that moment in Trinidad, it was hard not to feel sympathy for Obama and his team of young aides.  Unlike President Clinton, or his staff, who often reveled in the historic moments of the 1990s, its tougher now to truly enjoy the wondrous journey of serving as president or working in the White House. In his October 17, 2010 story, “The Education of a President” in the New York Times Magazine, Peter Baker reported:

In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. Everything seems to conspire against the idea: an implacable opposition with little if any real interest in collaboration, a news media saturated with triviality and conflict, a culture that demands solutions yesterday, a societal cynicism that holds leadership in low regard…

“We’re all a lot more cynical now,” one aide told me.

The aide that Baker quoted did so anonymously, and Obama and his staff may dispute this on the record, but I sensed those same barriers to success as early as April 2009 in Trinidad. It was very different in Clinton’s day, when the smiles and fun were genuine for many on the staff. Maybe the Obama team has convinced itself that this is what passes for political joy, but Port of Spain was not joyful, and it was only a two-day snapshot of the last 635 Groundhog Days of image warfare. The pace is too quick, the glorious moments too fleeting, the microscope too intense.

In Trinidad, it didn’t take long for the cycle to begin anew. Emboldened by the tsunami of coverage of “the handshake” — or because Chávez has a hearty appetite for press — the image duel amplified the next day when Chávez upped the ante.

On the schedule was one of several smaller sessions of regional leaders — the Union of South American Nations — at another nondescript function room in the Hyatt.  President Obama was seated at the head of a U-shaped assemblage of banquet tables.  Chávez was five or six seats away.  The agenda for these meetings is often perfunctory. Everyone gets to talk, and then it’s over, the communiqué agreed to well in advance, with very little substance playing out in the room. Before the soliloquies begin, there’s the obligatory “pool spray,” when a scrum of reporters and cameramen, often escorted in “waves” — one from the U.S. and one or two from the other participating countries — pour into the meeting room, shutters whirring, flashes firing, video toggle switches always engaged.

In these sprays, a question gets belted out from the wire or newspaper reporters.  The president answers, or tries to.  Then White House aides in attendance yell “thank you” in unison and start the often physical act of flushing the pool from the room.  The same cycle repeats for the next “wave” until, a few fast minutes later, it’s over, the doors close, and the meeting gets underway.  It’s almost always a mess.  Only a few seasoned press advance professionals can really pull it off cleanly.  My friend Anne Edwards is a genius directing this journalistic ballet.

Those pool sprays are what often passes for “coverage” of a meeting between world leaders until, a little later on, “senior administration officials,” speaking “on background,” offer a “readout” of what went on behind closed doors.  Readouts, of course, lend themselves to interpretation depending on who is doing the reading out.

Chávez, in Trinidad, didn’t follow the rulebook of diplomatic-media protocol.  When the first wave entered the room, with cameras rolling, Chávez did something I had never seen before in a multilateral meeting. He got up from his chair! He started moving toward President Obama, not unlike the move Obama had made in the reception the night before when the press had been barred. But there was something in his hand. What was it?  Should the Secret Service be concerned?  There wasn’t time to react.

Chávez was showing that he was a master of one of the most important rules in site advance: props sell!  In his hand was…a book. The title was in Spanish and I couldn’t make it out, but he knew exactly what he was doing when he thrust into Obama’s hands a copy of Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano.  It was meant as a gift.  A gift-prop.  Chávez and Obama both clutched the book in a moment of supreme presidential awkwardness.  Chávez said a few sentences in Spanish.  Photographers shot.  Reporters scribbled.  The moment was made.  Chávez sat back down.

The airwaves filled again. Watch the video of the exchange here. The blogs were refreshed. The book gifted from Chávez to Obama vaulted on Amazon’s ranking from 54,295 to 6 on that move.

The next day, Sunday, I wondered if anything could get worse. On the schedule, the last event of the summit was what was billed as a private retreat for the leaders at the official residence of Patrick Manning, the Trinidadian Prime Minister.  There were to be no aides. No security. Just simultaneous interpretation headphones that each leader could wear if needed, fed by a few select translators operating in a secure booth at the side of the room.

But nothing about this summit was turning out to be private. I could sense another photographic ambush. Somehow, I thought, the Venezuelans would figure out how to get another day in the spotlight at what was supposed to be a summit of equals.

Right before the doors of the retreat were sealed, I slipped into the room and ducked behind a curtain, into a small enclosed space where catering staff and few other stowaway aides had ensconced themselves. I waited, watching for anything out of the ordinary. Before long, I noticed my Venezuelan counterpart moving beyond our little alcove, making his way toward Obama with an English version of Galeano’s book. A gift was a gift, but I was done with impromptu photo ops on my watch.  With a swift tug, I snatched the book from the aide, saying I’d deliver it myself.  The book, eventually, made its way to the White House.

Should observers have been so exorcised by the string of encounters between Presidents Obama and Chávez?  Should I have been so sensitized by rounds 1 & 2 of their diplomatic dance for the lenses that I tried to pre-empt round 3? The debate would go on. It was left to the President to opine on the competing images at a press conference at the Summit’s conclusion.

Q: During the campaign you were criticized by some within your own party for perhaps not being able to be tough on foreign policy matters. Now you’ve had this friendly interaction with Mr. Chavez. Are you concerned at all about how this might be perceived back in the U.S. as perhaps being soft? Already one senator is calling this friendly interaction irresponsible. And as a quick follow-up, if I may, when you got the book from Mr. Chavez, what did you really think? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: I think it was a nice gesture to give me a book; I’m a reader. And you’re right, we had this debate throughout the campaign, and the whole notion was, is that somehow if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness. The American people didn’t buy it. And there’s a good reason the American people didn’t buy it — because it doesn’t make sense.You take a country like Venezuela — I have great differences with Hugo Chavez on matters of economic policy and matters of foreign policy. His rhetoric directed at the United States has been inflammatory. There have been instances in which we’ve seen Venezuela interfere with some of the — some of the countries that surround Venezuela in ways that I think are a source of concern.

On the other hand, Venezuela is a country whose defense budget is probably 1/600th of the United States’. They own Citgo. It’s unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States. I don’t think anybody can find any evidence that that would do so. Even within this imaginative crowd, I think you would be hard-pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of us having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela. So if the question, Dan, is, how does this play politically, I don’t know. One of the benefits of my campaign and how I’ve been trying to operate as President is I don’t worry about the politics — I try to figure out what’s right in terms of American interests, and on this one I think I’m right.

You have to hand it to Obama for putting it in perspective.

As a boy, I read about the meeting between JFK and Khrushchev in Vienna. As a student in college, I watched on TV the summits between Reagan and Gorbachev.  As a young White House aide, I was lucky enough to witness in person Bill Clinton convening the handshake of Arafat and Rabin.  And as a dinosaur advance man, I played a bit part in the meeting of Obama and Chávez. Different stakes, to be sure, but each encounter brought big risk as leaders sought a return on investment for their outstretched hands.

Our relations with Russia aren’t perfect, but the Cold War is a relic.  True peace continues to elude the Middle East, but we are now in the midst of a new round of talks.  Will the U.S. and Venezuela ever come closer to seeing things eye-to-eye?  Maybe not during the respective terms of Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez.  But some day, just as we give Ronald Reagan due credit for opening a dialogue with Mikhail Gorbachev when many felt it was not his nature, future historians and commentators will look back and remember, with some respect and admiration, when Barack Obama went to Port of Spain and offered his hand to the leader of a neighboring country.

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If you missed earlier parts of the the Story of Polioptics, begin at the beginning with Polioptics Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

And then continue reading The Story of Polioptics. Additional parts of the narrative will appear every few days. When it’s complete, it will be archived it its own section of www.Polioptics.com.

Stay tuned for the final post:

Part 10: Homage to Image

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The Story of Polioptics is a 10-part Web narrative based on a multi-media presentation — POLIOPTICS: Political Influence Through Imagery, From George Washington to Barack Obama — that debuted on college campuses in 2009.

The last post brought us up through the 2004 election, George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry.  By 2008 standards, it was antiquated.  By 2012 standards, it will probably be considered prehistoric.

Every election cycle will bring with it dramatic new advances in message-sending technology, but 2004 may go down as the last one fought primarily on the traditional media battleground.  After all, Facebook back then was still slowly coursing its way through college campuses rather than the home of more than 500 million members and the subject of a blistering new film from West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin.

The 2004 election was so…old media.  The concerted attack on Senator Kerry was, after all, the Swift Boats paid media campaign. True, the Swift Boat ad buy was small, comparatively, to the expenditure of the nominated Republican and Democratic candidates. But it undermined the Kerry campaign through endless repetition, for free, on broadcast airwaves and through the cable pipe into voters’ homes via political programming. In 2008, the Swift Boat effort would have gone viral much faster, as the less effective “Celeb” ad did from the McCain campaign that tried to compare Barack Obama to Paris Hilton.

And what will happen in 2012.  Will the “October Surprise” turn into the “November Surprise,” or even the “Election Day Surprise”? The killer message can now speed through the Web and land on a smart-phone at the speed of light.

The old pollster in me can’t resist proffering a few questions:

[poll id=”2″]

[poll id=”3″]

Think about what’s happened to news delivery since the 2004 election. You’re not the only one thinking about it. For traditional media companies, it’s a life or death issue.  If these questions were asked of a large group of politically engaged voters in 2003, the percentage of those answering “yes” would likely have been very small.  Today, among the general population, the number of those answering ‘yes’ is on a steady climb.

In 1996, when we were “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century” for President Clinton and Vice President Gore, the Internet was a non-factor in political combat.  Campaigns erected Web sites populated with static stuff: bios, phone numbers, issue papers.  Records show the Clinton re-elect raised only $10,000 on the Web.

Now move forward four years.  In 2000, John McCain won New Hampshire. When he accepted the victory, he did so from a podium that bore his site’s URL.  That event was seen on live television across the country.  Promoting a Web address through free media was a totally new idea at the time.  Yet there it was: a shrewd McCain staffer thought to paste the URL on a placard in a position that no lens could miss.  A viewer at home, inspired to join McCain’s cause, might make a brief note of the address and go online later to make a donation.  One event in New Hampshire yielded free exposure to 49 other states and encouraged immediate action.  The result: a $2.2 million online haul in a week.

Add on four more years, and Howard Dean showed the country how the Internet could organize volunteers on a national scale.

Now moving forward one more time, to 2008, Barack Obama raised half a billion dollars online through his Website.

For Obama, and Mitt Romney, the Internet also became a movie theater.  Traveling in Iowa in 2007, I ran across Michael Kolowich following Governor Romney at the Iowa State Fair.  Dressed like Survivor’s Jeff Probst, with grey hair and toting an advanced mini high-definition camera from Sony, he seemed anything like the lumbering cameramen who wielded cameras the size of small tree trunks in Bill Clinton’s day.  Michael told me was a friend of Mitt’s and gathering footage for something called MittTV.  Back at my hotel room, I logged on to see what he had produced.  Combining his fresh footage, music and voice-over while sitting in an airport waiting lounge, Kolowich cut together a news-quality mini-documentary presented in 16×9 aspect ratio and streaming in its own online player.

Back in 1992 working for Governor Clinton, much was made about how that campaign was trying to bypass traditional media, but the spin was always more than the reality.  In 2008, Kolowich was finally making real headway, producing entertaining shorts and posting them to the Web.  You had to be interested enough in Mitt Romney to go online and look for MittTV, but for those who made the effort, the videos offered a more expansive portrait of the candidate and his family than the networks or cable news would ever air.  It was only a matter of time, I thought, before such content was readily pushed directly to the handheld screens of the voting public.

Elsewhere on the trail, traditional reporting was also losing ground.  The most experienced reporters still worked for the major newspapers, but those newspapers were no longer the first place that readers went for information.  Even their Websites were being bypassed. You might end up at the same place, but getting there now included a trip though the sites of media news sites and aggregators that linked to all of the relevant reporting on a single subject from across the mainstream media landscape.  Case in point: when Senator Edward M. Kennedy died in August, 2009, the Washington Post offered a rich source of coverage, but it was easier to see the range of reporting by first visiting fivethirtyeight.com, Politico and, of course, Drudge, whose site offers the closest facsimile of the experience walking past a newspaper box of old.

It’s the ultimate media cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, and it’s one that I’ve avoided addressing so far in the Story of Polioptics, but its enduring presence in our lexicon speaks to its truthfulness.  Online resources trace it, perhaps erroneously, to a Chinese proverb, but it may have come to prominence in an old advertising trade journal.  The December 8, 1921 issue of Printer’s Ink included an article by Fred R. Barnard entitled “One Look is Worth A Thousand Words” in which the author discussed promotions that adorned streetcars.  Even Napoleon Bonaparte said, “Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu’un long discours,” or “A good sketch is better than a long speech.”

Whatever its origin, the digital content chiefs of the modern presidential campaign have picked up on the idea, providing more content — in the form of videos, photo galleries and Flickr feeds — than newspapers had resources to gather or room to cover.  On the surface, the Obama Websites and mobile apps from 2008 provided an attractive portal to learn more information about, contribute to, and volunteer for the candidate.  Digging a little deeper beneath the surface, though, is a still-vibrant Obama Flickr photostream that, as of this writing, contains nearly 56,000 images, stretching from the present to the earliest days of the campaign in 2007.  Each one of them, in its own way, offers a front row look or a backstage view of Obama’s campaign shot by his staff, volunteers or sympathizers.  This volume of content was never available from newspapers or cable networks, and likely never will be, but it’s now out there for anyone to see.

This Bill Clinton-era concept of bypassing the traditional media only increased as the 2008 Obama Campaign gave way to the 2009 Obama White House and as BarackObama.com transitioned to WhiteHouse.gov.  In the effort to pass comprehensive health care reform legislation, the White House Website included new features with streaming video from White House aides or citizens designed, as the site said, to combat “a lot of misinformation being spread by defenders of the status quo.”

The experiments begun by Michael Kolowich and others in the 2008 campaign have now become a part of official government Websites.

Compare that to the White House site in Clinton’s day.  It’s like looking at Alexander Graham Bell’s contraption and putting it up against the Droid.

The use of video in politics was building toward this for a while.  It was clear where things were headed in December 2006 when Senator Obama deadpanned this introduction to a nationally-televised football game.

Perfect delivery.  Perfectly pitched.  Perfect production quality (including a dolly shot).  Nice musical score.  No journalistic filter.  The trend continued as Hillary and Obama launched their campaigns from their living rooms, spread virally to contributors. It was unprecedented, but soon became the standard.  Even Fred Thompson lent his considerable actor’s cadence to the mix.  Hillary went so far as to recruit Vince Curatola from The Sopranos to tease her campaign song.

On assignment from Men’s Vogue in the summer of 2007, I headed to Iowa to see how campaigning was being waged for, and through, the lens.  I saw Hillary’s campaign cover all the basics: fill a high school school gym; put a cross-section of voters in the bleachers; wade into the audience for questions; include in the backdrop a few well-chosen, easily digestible words and; of course, don’t forget the American flag, hung vertically to recall a Joint Session of Congress.  But unlike the Romney or Edwards campaigns, she didn’t have a trailing videographer to capture video for a quick-turn edit and post to her Website.

By contrast, over the course of my heartland visit, Obama skirted the bigger cities, opting instead for rustic enclaves. In the rural town of Atlantic, Iowa, his team passed up an air-conditioned hall for, literally, a stockyard.  Wooden rafters.  Dusty floor.  Rickety chairs.  Hand painted signs on butcher paper. Soft lighting.  Theater, really, in the round.  Let the other guys fill the cinder block gymnasiums or add machined backdrops and advanced production elements.  The Obama campaign was going for an image of authentic grassroots interest, and what better place to promulgate that than an event site with a dirt floor?

Obama’s stop in Atlantic might have been looked at by other campaigns as a throwaway event.  It was in the afternoon, on a Saturday at the end of a long week, and destined for little real-time news coverage.  Sure, a few news photos would make it to the national wire, but it was unlikely any of them would grace a front page or be seen as “the shot of the day.”  But for filmmaker Amy Rice, who was trailing along filming her documentary for HBO, the rural scene fit perfectly with the movie’s title, “By The People.” Moreover, stops like this allowed the campaign to post even more content on the Obama Flickr photostream, adding to the frame-by-frame story of a candidate connecting at the grass- and net-roots.

From those determinedly rural beginnings, a more-polished, mass-marketed, standardized Obama event emerged.  While opponents tinkered with the look and feel of their events, focusing more on word choice for their backdrops than on the totality of event design and choreography, Obama’s “Change We Can Believe in” set, with its Gotham typeface against a blue field, was rigidly consistent — hypnotic, by design.

And here is where traditional campaigning segues to incredibly disciplined marketing.  Obama wasn’t just “staying on message” through what he said; he was staying on message in how he looked.  His campaign understood how to breed warmth and acceptance: Create a tested presentation; perfect it over time; stay with it relentlessly knowing that style and repetition breed familiarity.

One more tool Obama relied on, and does still, is the TelePrompTer. In 1959, the producer of I Love Lucy, Jess Oppenheimer, filed Patent #2883902, a device to help performers memorize scripts.  In Clinton’s White House, prompters were the exception, used only for only big events.  Mindful of the President’s propensity to veer off script, there were many who thought he should use them more.  But the counterarguments were that:

1)   They’re expensive;

2)   They’re complex;

3)   The glass paddles on which the script is projected look bad on video and in stills (and this is true), and;

4)   They’re perceived as a crutch.

Additionally, like any technology, they’re also prone to the inevitable screw ups that come from speeches with multiple revisions and prompter operators who aren’t fully in sync with the speaker.

One of the most famous prompter snafus came on September 22, 1993. President Clinton was addressing a Joint Session Congress on his proposed health care legislation but the wrong speech was loaded into the machine.  Several aides noticed the problem backstage as Clinton turned quizzically to Vice President Al Gore who was seated behind him.  With Congress, and the world watching on live television, the show had to go on.  He delivered the first part his speech largely from memory until the problem could be fixed.

The Obama Campaign (and now his White House) had a considered view about production and performance of live events: hitting the right phrase, in the right cadence, whether speaking to a Joint Session of Congress or a crowd in a corn field, is worth risking the downsides of using a TelePrompTer.  Does Obama take criticism in certain circles for doing this?  Of course.  There are Websites and blogs devoted exclusively to the subject, but until former Vice President Walter Mondale chimed in, very little of the criticism had crossed into the mainstream.  Instead, what does make a difference is the considerable production advantage from the TelePrompTers and their Army-trained operators supplied by the White House Communications Agency. When the event starts, the cameras are always rolling and the world is always watching, and the president rarely trips over his message. During 2008, the Clinton and McCain campaigns didn’t embrace the tools of television production. In comparison, Obama, like an anchorman, delivered perfectly polished paragraphs each time out.

With increasing frequency, candidates at many levels from both parties are taking to the stage with the aid of a TelePrompTer.  Sarah Palin must know her delivery is better with a prompter, as cluttered it may sometimes look with the glass paddles erected between her and the cameras.  And following his win in the 2010 Arizona Republican primary, John McCain, who was rarely seen with a TelePrompTer two years ago, had it front and center for his victory speech, his eyes often glued to scrolling prompter.

It may offend some people’s sensibilities, but even great candidates need great production in a video age when appearance counts and every sentence might become the soundbite for the evening news.  Indeed, in the Internet age, every appearance may bypass the evening news and be posted online in its entirety, from introduction to conclusion.  The state-of-the-art of political production is passed down among advance people from generation-to-generation.  Political practitioners of a certain age got their first taste of the do’s and don’ts of the campaign trail from Jerry Bruno’s long-out-of-print memoir of his globetrotting years with John F. Kennedy called The Advance Man.  In 1998, I collected some of the best lessons passed down to me organized them into a booklet, “Notes on Creating Visuals & Presidential-Style Communications,” elements of which have been incorporated into the advance manuals of subsequent campaigns, including that of Senator Obama.

The Obama election night rally in Grant Park on November 4, 2008 incorporated many of the timeless lessons of political production, and elevated them to a new level.

When the president-elect’s acceptance speech ended, the music that played immediately after he finished speaking wasn’t an instantly-recognizable song from Bruce Springsteen, U2 or Motown, to which some advance people gravitate believing, mistakenly, that it will elevate an event.  Rather, the music at Grant Park was the instrumental soundtrack theme from a moderately successful 2000 Denzel Washington movie, Remember the Titans, which is based on the true story of African American football coach Herman Boone and how he brought together the racially divided football team at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria Virginia.  Obama had visited T.C. Williams earlier in the campaign and gave a shout-out to Coach Boone.  And in Denver, when Obama accepted the Democratic Nomination at Invesco Field, another track from the album was played.

All the elements of packaged political persuasion came together in Chicago at Grant Park, in many respects a perfect event.

Section 11 of my booklet on creating Presidential-style communications focuses on music.  It reads, in part, “Leave the audience with a mature, adult sound in their ears.”  That sums up the entire Obama 2008 effort: a mature, adult production in all respects – Internet, the stage set, strategic use of prompter, even music at Grant Park – all pivotal ingredients of Obama’s victory.

As the Obama team savored victory, for some a new question arose: how would the elements of visual production, so successful in a presidential campaign, translate to the everyday work of government in the White House? We’ll take up that question in the next post.

~~~~~~~~~~

If you missed earlier parts of the the Story of Polioptics, begin at the beginning with Polioptics Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.

And then continue reading The Story of Polioptics. Additional parts of the narrative will appear every few days. When it’s complete, it will be archived it its own section of www.Polioptics.com.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts:

Part 8: The First 100 Days…And the Next Thousand
Part 9: Port of Spain
Part 10: Homage to Image

~~~~~~~~~

The Story of Polioptics is a 10-part Web narrative based on a multi-media presentation — POLIOPTICS: Political Influence Through Imagery, From George Washington to Barack Obama — that debuted on college campuses in 2009.

Part 4 of the Story of Polioptics opened in 1976 and swung open the door to the media presidency.  Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, each in their own way, ran outsider campaigns in ’76 and ’80 and won their contests riding a wave of the mere exposure effect.

In 1988, George H.W. Bush temporarily stalled that trend, becoming the first sitting vice president to win election since 1836, when Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson.  A few pivotal visual moments aided the vice president’s cause. One was this watershed sequence in the presidential debate against Governor Michael Dukakis when, in response to a provocative question from CNN’s Bernard Shaw, the governor offered a clinical response to what many husbands would consider fightin’ words.

Then there was the Bush campaign’s mocking ad of what advance people hold high as the most spectacularly failed photo op in presidential campaign history.  And to put the nail in the Dukakis’s coffin, there was Willie Horton.

Once in office, however, Bush failed, with few exceptions, to match his predecessor’s mastery of the visual.  I was captivated by this Diana Walker shot for Time of President Bush at Magic Hour with the troops in Kuwait — and I learned a lot about imagery from Diana during my White House years — but, beyond that, the enduring images of Bush that visualists recall today are supermarket scanners and looking at your watch.

William Jefferson Clinton then took the free media-dominated visual campaign to a new level.

Back in 1991, when his title was simply Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, I answered an invitation from an old friend from the Dukakis campaign to attend the Clinton advance school in Little Rock. I looked at the calendar and saw that I had eight months before I was scheduled to begin business school. Why not head back on the road, see a few new parts of the country, and help out the long shot Democratic candidate?  I ended up never going to business school.  I ended up in the White House.

With a few initial advance trips for Clinton under my belt, I went home to Boston in early 1992 and took stock of the rote events featuring candidates of both parties that were being staged in front of blue curtains.  A question kept gnawing at me: What Would Deaver Do?  In a campaign whose most captivating visual was Ross Perot holding up a chart, how can you position a presidential candidate as more action-oriented?

The California primary was the biggest prize for Democratic candidates.  That summer, the America’s Cup was being staged off the coast of San Diego.  What better backdrop for a man of action than the foamy surf of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by tacticians and winch grinders?  With this JFK shot in mind, I faxed a note to a friend on the governor’s advance staff suggesting that Governor Clinton should go sailing with one of the America’s Cup teams.  Bad idea.  We have since learned that the high seas bring high risks. My note, thankfully, was ignored.

As the months passed, taking cues from those old pictures of Reagan in Time Magazine, my eye for the visual became more refined. I stayed out on the road full time for Governor Clinton, moving from coast to coast helping to produce events for the campaign on an increasingly grand scale.  Channeling that iconography that had such a powerful impact on me as a boy, and carrying with me Reagan’s best moments that I had watched from my dorm room in college, my events mixed together the political ingredients of front page photos. There were colorful characters, caption-inspiring props, the sense of motion that excites editors, music that adds rhythm to an event, and lighting which accentuates the key elements.  These ingredients were then baked into compelling campaign moments.

The job of a site advance man is like that of an architect designing an urban landscape. Every event should be designed down to last square the inch using a pencil, ruler and graph paper. Consider this sketch as a case in point: I was in Baltimore operating with vague instructions from Little Rock to find an event site for a late afternoon hit somewhere within 15 minutes driving distance of Baltimore-Washington International Airport.  By happenstance, I drove my rental car into the parking lot of a nearly deserted baseball field called the Randazzo Softball Complex just a few miles from the BWI runway.  Beyond a couple of guys playing pickup softball, the place was a blank canvas.

“Can you put together two teams?” I asked the ballplayers. I said we might be able to reach out to a screen printing shop to create some appropriate softball uniforms to finish the scene.  We printed tickets, designed pennants and recruited a crowd. If you build it, they will come. What began as batting practice became an evening spectacle played out in front of 3,000 fans.  The notes scratched out on ruled paper became this: a Maryland softball game instead of a rally, written up in the Washington Post oozing with metaphor.

Clinton didn’t need to make a speech.  All we needed was a classic photo op – throwing out the first pitch — to capture just the right message in the stories in the next day’s newspaper.

To the annoyance of Clinton’s traveling staff, the scene proved too fun to leave at that.  The governor also took a turn at the plate and they worried that it would draw analogies to Casey At The Bat: Mighty Clinton striking out.  Instead, he beat out an infield single, and scored a run for the anointed “home team” — the Stingers.

Elsewhere along the 1992 campaign trail, steel towns proved ripe for visuals.  Weirton, West Virginia oozed history — a town where both John and Robert Kennedy visited during their respective campaigns.  Bill Clinton and his new running mate, Al Gore, would visit the town on one of their stops on their first bus tour after leaving the Democratic Convention in New York City.  Wierton Steel, which has since gone bankrupt and been sold to foreign investors, was then a model for employee stock ownership and was happy to host the new ticket.  But to make the picture work it helped to have their hard hats labeled.

Another bus tour took us to Central Florida, the Sunshine State’s staunchly Republican horse country.  We found the Ocala Shrine Rodeo Arena unused and convinced the decision makers in Little Rock that we could fill it with a rabid throng to welcome the Democratic Ticket.  They didn’t believe us, but were happy to find folks hanging from the rafters when the busses arrived.

To lend more drama to the moment, we planned to have the candidates’ tour bus roll right off the highway into the middle of the packed bowl, forming an instant backdrop for the event.  It was one thing to pack a community center in Democrat-dominated West Virginia; quite another to top that in heavily Republican Florida.  Waking up at our Holiday Inn the next morning, coverage in the influential St. Petersburg Times made all the effort worthwhile. Of particular note was the declarative column by local pundit Howard Troxler:

“But it was Ocala that stuck with me the most. That crowd hooted and hollered and jumped like nothing else I’ve seen, and as I sat there, the thought that I had been pushing aside for days finally fought its way out into the open: He’s going to win, isn’t he?  He’s going to win Florida, and he is going to be president.”

Howard Troxler Column
St. Petersburg Times
October 7, 1992

When a politically unpredictable columnist declares, as a result of the images you created, that your Democratic candidate is going to win deep in Republican territory, it validates the days of sweat and worry that went into making it happen.

Less than a month later, the Clinton-Gore advance team road warriors gathered in Little Rock on Election Night.  Campaign Scheduler Susan Thomases assembled us in an empty office building and described — in terms unbelievable at the time — how we would soon find ourselves overseas representing the President of the United States on historic state visits.  As we stood there, weary from weeks of nonstop campaigning, we couldn’t wait to get our passports stamped.

In one way or another, many of us made our way to Washington to begin pursuing Susan’s promise.  Persistence — and equal doses of luck and good timing — soon sent me to the White House as one of the President’s three schedulers.  When a White House event lacked a visually-minded producer, I lent a hand in bringing Mike Deaver’s production values to Clinton’s White House.  We were choreographing front-page moments set against one of the world’s most recognizable backdrops.  In the spring of 1993, when the tragedy that inspired Blackhawk Down sped the return home of the Marines stationed in Mogadishu, we worked to suitably welcome them back to the South Lawn.  It was a stage unlike any other.

My big break came in September that year when the President traveled to meet Pope John Paul II for the first time at World Youth Day in Denver. I wasn’t there, but word quickly came back of a significant advance snafu that has since become legend.  A member of our staff, trying to reduce the human clutter of people wandering between “the principals” — the president and the 73-year-old pontiff — and the planned backdrop of Air Force One, yanked one of them aside, a white-robed minister, said to be the Vatican’s Secretary of State.

Advance people can become too focused on perfection.  Sometimes, you just have to trust the photographers to hold their fire, let the shot clear itself out and the event to find it’s groove.

That gave me, at age 27, an opportunity to serve as the White House director of production.  Every day, my job would be to help manage the event portfolio with responsibilities similar Mike Deaver in the decade before.  One of the early memorable moments was the signing of legislation establishing Americorps.  The plan started out as rather ordinary: erect a tent on the South Lawn; invite a crowd; usher in the press; make a speech; sign the bill with a handful of pens emblazoned with the Presidential Seal and call it a day.

But tents are hard to work in. They muffle sound, kill light and restrict maneuver.  It’s damned tough to make a good picture in a tent.

Americorps

“So,” I thought, “let’s tweak it a bit.” A diagram was drawn.  Some persuasion was needed.  Eventually, when the president emerged from the Oval Office expecting a routine bill signing, we ushered him down South Drive, hidden from view.  He took his place behind a grove of trees among a gaggle of red-jacket Americorps volunteers who would escort him up the South Lawn to the event site.  Positioned 50 years away with a clear line of sight was a selected pool of photographers strategically positioned to capture “the walk up.”  The band was cued.  The walk began.  The shutters whirred.

Here’s what made this image Page One material in the New York Times and why it is still remembered: it was a cinematic moment.  George H.W. Bush rarely did events that featured physical movement.  They were static, often staged in front of that ubiquitous blue drape.  Instead, we looked at what Hollywood was doing — the framing of and iconic scene in Armageddon was borrowed from a similar moment in Tombstone, which was a takeoff of the beloved image of The Magnificent Seven.  Lenses love motion, whether on foot or horseback – the genuine smiles on the kids faces; the clapping hands extended; the legs captured in mid-stride — and we were feeding the lenses.

• The same ideas were found in Iowa in ’93 when the Mississippi burst its banks. Going to the river to get the briefing from Governor Terry Branstad comes off as more empathetic than gving a speech behind a podium. Don’t get me wrong, you still do the speech in order to give substance to the story, but the image is what moves emotions on Page 1.
• In 1994, we staged the First Summit of the Americas in Miami (I would later return briefly to advance work to help with President Obama’s trip to the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad).  This picture doesn’t tell the whole story of trying to get three dozen heads of state and government to mimic one of those old movie posters with a “group walk” up to an awaiting platform for an otherwise-static “family photo.”
• Remember those iconic pictures of the World War II allies — FDR, Churchill and Stalin — at summits in Yalta and Casablanca?  In homage to those days, in the fall of 1995, we helicoptered President Clinton and his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, from New York City to FDR’s home for a summit at Hyde Park.  We purposefully posed Bill and Boris with their backs to the cameras (the press was herded behind ropes to manipulate them into position to shoot only the unique angle) so that their facial features didn’t distract the viewer from equating the modern leaders with their forebears.  Most major newspapers carried the same Stephan Savoia AP photo of Clinton and Yeltsin in FDR’s wicker chairs against the fall foliage and the splendor of the Hudson River Valley.
• On a historic visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the end of the year, a U.S. Air Force plane flew a Tennessee Christmas tree across the Atlantic to the city center.  Van Morrison provided the musical accompaniment as Clinton pulled a lever with a Catholic girl and Protestant boy to light the symbol of peace before a gathered throng.  The picture played out exactly as we designed it with a pencil, ruler and graph paper, and it too was a focal point for the world’s front pages.
• Days later, in Baumholder, Germany, with U.S. troops about to become involved in the war in Bosnia, inspiration came from the early Alexander Gardner photos of Lincoln at Antietam.  The soldiers of the 1st Armored Division assembled in ranks as the Commander-in-Chief and his generals, hidden from view, turned a corner and entered the parade ground in full stride, walking headlong into a small pool of photographers positioned to capture the entrance.  The result: two rare “double truck” photos as the lead stories in Time and Newsweek.  The picture made the message.
• A few weeks later, now into January of President Clinton’s reelection year, we again joined U.S. soldiers participating as part of the NATO Implementation Force, or IFOR, this time in their encampment in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina.  The wrinkle here – to the chagrin of the Secret Service, which would have happily driven the president to the back of the event site in a heavily armored vehicle — was to take advantage of the geometry of the “cutaway” press position.  From a slightly elevated platform, they captured the President—escorted by General William Nash—entering from the front of the event site directly through a cordon of saluting troops.
• The remainder of the year was largely devoted to the reelection campaign.  The campaign’s theme, like Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America,” was built on a poll-tested metaphor: “Building a Bridge to the 21^stCentury.”  Even our “21^stCentury Express” whistle-stop train tour that carried Clinton from Huntington, West Virginia through the rust belt states of Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, on his way to the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago, Illinois, echoed Reagan’s trip 12 years before.  Bill Clinton and his second term team would provide that bridge to a new millennium.  The speeches, talking points and, yes, the design of the events themselves, were centered around that phrase and other heavily-researched reinforcing nuggets of language, like “Meeting America’s Challenges” and “Protecting America’s Values.”
• Looking at a typical event image in the newspaper or the evening news, you didn’t have to read the whole story or listen to the full evening news report to have the message sink in.  In a single glance, viewers caught the President, his campaign metaphor and the easily read nugget on information, conveying the whole story without a single line of text from the actual story.

My most-cherished project – the 50^th Anniversary of D-Day in 1994 – was also my biggest screw-up.

A story board from Normandy

We went to Europe twice on White House “pre-advance” trips to story-board how the images might play out in the press. We studied archival footage of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 visit to commemorate the 40th Anniversary, site of the emblematic “Boys of Point du Hoc” speech that made Peggy Noonan famous.  I remembered, and greatly admired, news magazine photos of Ron and Nancy in a seemingly private moment visiting the graves of fallen soldiers. At Nettuno Cemetery in Italy, for example, we worked with the wire photographers to give them special access to pre-planned stops on the president’s route through the soldier’s final resting place.  They used that access to stage remote-fired cameras to capture the visit from new angles.

But while much of the visit to Normandy would echo Reagan’s from a decade earlier, we decided to do something Reagan never did: visit Omaha Beach itself.

Clinton couldn’t do it alone—that would not adequately tell the story of the veterans’ sacrifice.  So we researched the archives of D-Day Medal of Honor recipients like Bob Slaughter who planned to make the return trip to France, and we selected three veterans still sprightly enough to accompany Clinton for a long walk down a winding path to Omaha where they would say a prayer for fallen comrades.  We storyboarded that walk, too.

The Secret Service, understandably, expressed reservations about the idea; after all, the walk would end at the water’s edge beneath the high ground that five decades before offered an advantageous position to repel the invading allies.  The contours of the coastline hadn’t changed in 50 years, and the same high ground was a headache to neutralize with counter-sniper teams.  But we worked it out – spotting the planned prayer in an area that could be safely protected.

Then, a last minute curve ball.  A senior member of the White House staff cut a deal with Newsweek for Pulitzer-winning photographer Eddie Adams – memory can’t erase these shots of his from the Vietnam War – to have a private, exclusive photo opportunity to cover Clinton on the beach.

The Secret Service doesn’t like curve balls, especially on a wide open beach. The agent assigned to work with me insisted we take steps to insure that the president not venture further onto the beach out of the secure area.  To mark a boundary that the president could easily see, I found a field of large rocks that separated the fine Omaha Beach sand from the tall grass that led up to the National Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer.  Over the course of five sweaty minutes, I ferried a small pile of those rocks about 30 feet onto the beach.

When the president approached with his accompanying veterans, I pulled him aside and told him about the curve-ball we were thrown and cautioned him to stay on our side of the improvised rock pile to assure his safety.  He said okay and rejoined the decorated vets.

The prayer happened as planned. It was a soulful, genuine moment. Photos that quickly moved on the wire, and in the world press, reflected that. I thought — with some satisfaction — that we put our own imprint on commemorating D-Day, breaking out of the famous Reagan mold and offering a memorable moment that would fill veterans unable to make the trip with much deserved pride.

Unfortunately, we weren’t done. The veterans were ushered back to my position near the grass out of camera range. Adams moved in.  But he had lost a step since Vietnam.  Minutes passed as he changed lenses and adjusted his position. Clinton, lacking much else to do on the beach, killed time waiting for Adams.  Eventually, he wandered over to our stone pile and, ad libbing our script, squatted in front of them.  He fashioned the 20 or so rocks placed as a boundary marker into the shape of a cross, just like the 9,000 American crosses at the cemetery high above us.

This simple act — the emotional coda to several days worth or heart-wrenching remembrance – was the equivalent of giving a year’s worth of material to Rush Limbaugh. Loaded with ammo, the talk show host roared into action and thrust his criticism onto the airwaves.  I haven’t listened to Rush in a while, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he still talks about it.  To this I can attest: when Barack Obama recently visited the Louisiana coastline to see for himself the tar balls from the BP oil spill that washed up on the beach, I received a number of snarky emails that compared the new president’s photo op with my 1994 folly (it’s interesting, by the way, the convenient cropping that went on with the Obama scene).

It’s fair to argue about the genuineness of what was, frankly, a scrupulously planned set of events.  But in the modern presidency, with a press corps that demands access, is there any choice but to plan?  The alternative—and I can attest to this, too, from many unplanned presidential moments in my experience—is media mayhem.   Our objective in going to Normandy—part of any president’s job—was to honor the sacrifice of our veterans and show them a country’s gratitude.  The compositions are largely interchangeable.  The task is the same, no matter if the advance people are representing President Reagan, Clinton, Bush or Obama.  We are telling a story.  Sometimes it is sad; sometimes it is uplifting.  In the 1990′s, the lenses of the traveling press corps were our only immediate conduits to people back home. In fairness to Clinton, he hadn’t a clue the rocks would be there. He reacted as many might as a photographer fumbled for his lens and delayed a shoot, reflecting on many days spent amid thousands of crosses.  He made one of his own.

My error—knowing how any action taking place in front of a lens can be misconstrued—was veering from the planned script.

In June 2009, Barack Obama continued the long tradition of U.S. Presidents paying homage to veterans at Normandy. As we read the stories of veterans who return or are no longer there, it’s always a moving moment.  As fewer remain of the Greatest Generation each day, the process of honoring them in person is coming to an end. I only wish, with Clinton’s visit, I hadn’t allowed a photo too far.

~~~~~~~~~~

If you missed earlier parts of the the Story of Polioptics, begin at the beginning with Polioptics Part 1 and Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

And then continue reading The Story of Polioptics. Additional parts of the narrative will appear every few days. When it’s complete, it will be archived it its own section of www.Polioptics.com.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts:

Part 6: The 21st Century Presidency
Part 7: The Internet, Pop Culture and the Rise of Obama
Part 8: The First 100 Days…And the Next Thousand
Part 9: Port of Spain
Part 10: Homage to Image

~~~~~~~~~

The Story of Polioptics is a 10-part Web narrative based on a multi-media presentation — POLIOPTICS: Political Influence Through Imagery, From George Washington to Barack Obama — that debuted on college campuses in 2009.

In Polioptics Part 2, we looked at Founding Fotos — the images forming a visual aesthetic for a kid headed, years later, for the job at the White House tasked with visual storytelling.  In this post, we key in on what, in particular, makes those images—and others like them—compelling.

Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning black and white image was only one of many that created the prism though which I saw America. On the multi-colored end of the spectrum, the Betsy Ross flag, and the mythology surrounding it, always stirred emotions. So, too, did the Golden Spike. Massive locomotives parked nose-to-nose, one coming from the East, one coming from the West, symbolized Manifest Destiny.

And though they were illustrations, not photos, Virginia Lee Burton captured the American can-do spirit in Mike Mulligan. The out-moded steam shovel, in the arena of the skeptical small town, out for one last gasp of glory.  The grey grittiness of Dorothea Lange and the steely essence of industrialized America through the lens of Margaret Bourke-White, celebrated the human and engineering effort that built the country.  And the exuberance of an America, victorious at war, was captured perfectly through the immigrant’s eye of Alfred Eisenstadt.  The list goes on.

What are the images that are iconic to you?  What conjures your youth?  What embodies the place you all home?  Almost everyone has their own collection, either mounted in albums or stored in their head.  Nostalgia: delicate but potent.

Don Draper certainly knows about images and potency.  Culled from the life experience of series creator Matthew Wiener, Draper, in the first season finale of MAD MEN, brings his audience to tears as he narrates flashing images of his family that form the carousel of life.

[youtube clip_id=”suRDUFpsHus”]

As Don said:

“…there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new’. Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product, ‘nostalgia’. It’s delicate, but potent. Sweetheart. Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”

Talk about nostalgia.  In the 198o’s, the images in Time Magazine were my carousel, arriving in my family’s mailbox every Tuesday afternoon, greeting me when I arrived home from school.  I’ve kept almost every issue, now stored away in file boxes.  I can’t part with them.  They defined the world in which I grew up.  The ads and photos, together, laid out page-by-page, moving through the magazine from politics at the front to culture at the back, are a time capsule.

Reading the magazine in those years, my eyes gravitated to the scenes that Ronald Reagan’s imagemaker, Mike Deaver, created on the stump to showcase his boss. When I got to the White House, I reached out to Deaver, who became a sort of mentor of mine. Partisan differences didn’t matter: I was interested in his visual style—how he used angles, access and lighting to control the frame—and he was open in imparting his visual sensibility.  When asked how Reagan was able to connect with people, especially when news coverage of him might have been critical, Deaver told reporters to mute the volume. The audience wasn’t listening, he said; they were watching.

When given the option, Deaver and his advance teams would put Reagan on a pedestal, literally.  They knew that photographers shooting a subject from a low angle would capture a large dose of blue sky to frame the president’s head.  It could have been a high stage, or the stair landing of a framed-out house.  If the lens is aimed upward, the upward angle increases the subject’s stature.

Deaver knew his psychology. We have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. We use these senses to perceive, cataloguing the information we glean in our brains.

Which of those senses is dominant?  Studies show that we get about 80% of all information through vision: light moving through the cornea, pupil and lens, bending as it falls on the retina and moves toward the brain.

In politics, what we see has a profound effect on how we’re influenced.  Our lives are frenetic; there’s less and less time to read.  How often do you fully digest a news story, word-for-word, as opposed to glancing at the picture to form an impression of the narrative?  It’s a lot easier, or at least faster, to get a sense of a news article from the photo, or “art,” as photo editors say, that accompanies it.

Today, awareness of the “optics” of a political moment is more common than in years past.  On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, co-host Mika Brzesinski makes frequent mention of the impact of visuals while the show airs footage that runs over her banter with Joe Scarborough.  It’s more in the open now — or at least there are more outlets to talk about it.  Manufacture of image used to be a fairly well-kept secret, and news organizations generally steered clear of pulling back the veil.  In the White House in the 1990s, at ‘event meetings’ every day in the Roosevelt Room, or one of many conference rooms within the Old Executive Office Building, senior aides would always draw attention back to the central concern and ask aloud the question: “What are the optics on this?” The answer would often decide whether or not the president should take a trip or participate in an event.

With all due respect to speechwriters, images can often dwarf what’s written, said and heard.

At the beginning of the last century, newspapers were text-only.  Then photos started to appear to help tell the story.  And eventually, especially with the arrival of Al Neuharth’s USA Today in 1982, color took over.  USA Today’s once ubiquitous newspaper box transformed American sidewalks.  It was not by accident that USA Today’s newspaper boxes were designed to suggest a television sitting on a busy street.  Though, like pay phones, newspaper boxes are now disappearing, these kiosks had a purpose to their construction, serving as a window for passers-by to absorb the day’s events in a glance.

White House aides know this, as do Fortune 100 marketers.  It’s why, despite protests of “over-exposure,” they welcome their principal on five news shows in a day. Psychologists calls this “the mere exposure effect”–people develop preferences based on nothing more than familiarity. (Research on this phenomenon—later described as the “glow of warmth”—goes back almost 150 years to Germany’s Gustav Fechner.) To measure the effect, researchers use a tachistoscope, showing how subliminal exposures create positive vibes.  Show something over and over, and it begins to settle into the consciousness in an agreeable way.  Just ask Don Draper.

Palin, Miller, O'Donnell, Brown

People can say what they will about Sarah Palin, Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell or Scott Brown, but a ‘mere exposure’ to any of them is not disagreeable.  For these new arrivals on the national stage, their image is a compelling calling card that helps sell their message.  And if their message is substantive, its an even more compelling package.  Put this new generation of candidates on a split screen against opponents that central casting would label “career politician” and the contrast can have an effect on average voters.  Palin has created her brand and Brown is in the Senate.  It remains to be seen whether O’Donnell and Miller can close their deal with the voters.

How quickly can an image turn opinion? Research findings published in 2007 found that momentary images of the Israeli flag persuaded audiences to adopt more moderate political stances from the extremes at which they started.  None of this should make us hold our breath that flag-filled rallies will usher in peace in the Middle East, but it’s not like the Israelis are alone in imbuing their parades with color.

While there are always new audiences to influence—it’s why ‘President-fatigue’ is often cured by increased travel abroad more in second terms—the exposure effect has a downside.  New hit songs enjoy wide airplay on the nation’s radio stations, but only rarely to they become classics before another tune grabs attention.  It’s one reason that advertisements, even the great ones, run their course and get pulled from rotation, their effect worn.

But when a classic does make a momentary return, we’re reminded why we loved it in the first place:

[youtube clip_id=”xffOCZYX6F8″]

The carousel of visual history we embarked on in Part 1 picks up in the next post where we left off in Part 2.  The year is 1976.  As the nation prepares to celebrate its Bicentennial, a battle brews between the perceived career politician, Gerald Ford, and the outsider, Jimmy Carter, enjoying the advantage of the mere exposure effect.  In that campaign, Carter, of all people, becomes the man who ushers in the new age of the visual presidency.

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If you missed earlier parts of the the Story of Polioptics, begin at the beginning with Polioptics Part 1 and Part 2.

And then continue reading The Story of Polioptics. Additional parts of the narrative will appear every few days. When it’s complete, it will be archived it its own section of www.Polioptics.com.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts:

Part 4: Road to the White House
Part 5: Director of Production
Part 6: The 21st Century Presidency
Part 7: The Internet, Pop Culture and the Rise of Obama
Part 8: The First 100 Days…And the Next Thousand
Part 9: Port of Spain
Part 10: Homage to Image