Personality in politics - 19 November 1993

Some years ago, an American magazine offered its readers an intriguing little puzzle which, after the first go, it decided never to try again for a simple reason that tugs at the root of the relationship between a paper and its readers.

It must enlighten them of course, it may even go so far as to instruct them in what it takes to be their duty as citizens. But it must never humiliate them. The magazine published a full page of close-up photographs of a dozen men and at the bottom of the page it printed a scrambled list of their separate professions, trades, occupations. You had to match each face with its true occupation. You turned, so to speak, into your own castling director.

In the, in the long ago, on occasional visits to Hollywood, I like to get in on the casting of a film, just to watch the casting director shuffling through eight by ten glossy photographs and saying, "Well, he's plainly OK for a psychiatrist and this fella should be a gangster's hit man". Often the choices were so automatic that they didn't take long to fill the entire cast. What I, Mr Pedantic Fusspot, would from time to time point out with some glee was that Norman Mailer, say, didn't look like a novelist at all but more like a retired middleweight boxing champion, which may of course have been his idea all along. Or looking at the gaunt, sculptured dignity of some actor they'd just cast as the British ambassador, I'd point out that the British ambassador to the United States at that point was a jolly, roly-poly bald-head.

I've often thought that the casting director is the most under-rated person in the whole movie-making business and can, sometimes, decisively change an actor's role and create a new star. Before that old classic The Thin Man, William Powell was a rather mangy, boiled-owl type of villain with what we used to call a cricketer's moustache, nine on one side, eight on the other. And Myrna Loy, they changed her surname to reinforce her appearance as a slit-eyed Oriental seductress, even murderous. One time, in a hilarious movie I can't see too often, she murdered, by just being close by and concentrating, she murdered 13 women. But then some bright, unorthodox casting director thought of William Powell as a genial, honest detective with a wry sense of humour and a tendency to mix lethal martinis. Myrna Loy was transformed at a stroke into an adorable wife, tolerating her waggish mate with a sigh and a wisecrack and hey, we had a wholly new idea, new to the movies then, of a happy married couple that stayed happy from beginning to end. Neither of them ever looked back into the shadows of their murky past.

Well now to the game, if you can reach back so far as to recall my magazine that printed the faces of 12 men, printed a scrambled bunch of professions, trades, occupations and asked you to match the face and the occupation. It came out, when the results were in, that the majority were about 50% wrong. But since the people with a 50% mark chose quite different answers, it's almost as if everyone were 100% wrong. At least you could say practically nobody agreed on anybody. Sort of thing you had in the result was, say, a majority chose a scruffy, wide-eyed character as an unemployed labourer or a felon and he was, in life, a Nobel prize-winner in physics. A rather splendid face with a rock-like jaw and wise eyes was generally dubbed to be a judge or the president of a national corporation. He was a serial killer. When the competition was all over and the results published, the editor said, never again. Too many people were made to look foolish. I suppose many more people felt they'd been tricked than felt they'd been nudged into the point the magazine was trying to make, which is that we see in a face what we bring to it.

Now, I believe something very similar goes on with the debating of great political issues. More than most of us will admit, I think we are unduly swayed, less by the issues and more by our personal view of the debaters. How many people do you know whose favourite commentator or politician is an opponent of their own political views? A great deal comes down to the looks, the manner, the voice, the way, as the song says, the way you wear your hair. And sometimes, don't you wish that your party favourite were better looking proponent of his and your views. Throughout Jimmy Carter's presidency, devout Democrats prayed that the Lord might touch him with a smidgeon of charm. Loyal Republicans often had to fight their way through the barbed wire of President Eisenhower's syntax to believe he was saying what they hoped he was saying, but Eisenhower had charm and force and on critical issues, they carried the day over the more literate or reasonable pleas of his opponents.

Well, last week President Clinton did something that provoked a rumble of groans across the republic. He picked Vice President Al Gore to debate Mr Ross Perot on the burning issue of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which we ought to remember was originally President Bush's production and which was going this week to the House of Representatives for approval or rejection. The groans were a fair comment on what most people thought was a fatal mistake of judgement on the president's part. The vice president is likeable, he's very good-looking in a pasteurised sort of way. He's an earnest advocate on environmental protection, sometimes at all costs. He is indeed earnest on many matters. He appears to have no humour at all. He can be very sincere, very dogged and very boring. His opponent, Mr Perot, I need hardly tell you is a sassy, mischievous, funny, quick-witted, slippery character, at his best immensely entertaining in the frontier tradition of Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Will Rogers.

Many of us thought setting up Mr Gore against Mr Perot violated the Constitution in subjecting the vice president to cruel and unusual punishment. Well, we were all wrong. By a national majority of two to one, people in the polls not only decided that Mr Gore won the debate, but that Mr Perot had turned mean, bad-tempered and on one crucial issue, proved a liar. Mr Gore accused him of lobbying the House Ways and Means Committee to see that a company run by his son got a free trade zone in and around a Texas airport of the family's construction. The facts are beyond cavil and all Mr Perot could do was to come over all mean and squinty-eyed, like a bad guy in an old Western and himself snarl, you lie, you lie. The vice president kept his cool and his accusation and I believe that right there Mr Perot swung many wobbling votes over to the NAFTA Clinton side.

I suppose no one will ever know really whether the final vote in the House was between the president and the unions. The president has maintained all along that to open America to Mexican buying and Mexico to American exports is the open door to free trade with many other nations beginning with Latin America and going on to the Far East. Organised labour, once the most dependable ally of any Democratic president and on this issue his bitterest opponent, has never budged from seeing NAFTA in Mr Perot's terms as a thief of American labour, a shameless sanctuary for American corporations to retreat to from high-paid American labour to Mexicans slaving a seventh of the northerners' wages.

In the weeks before the vote, few presidents since Lyndon Johnson have gone in for such a sustained night and day bout of arm-twisting, pleading, begging, wheeling and dealing. The humblest congressman known to be against the agreement was telephoned by Mr Clinton and assured that he or she could be one of the saviours of the republic. Many reluctant votes came at a high price, side deals had to be cut, promises of emergency protection later on to all sorts of congressmen and women, whose constituency has a special livelihood, from beef or textiles, peanut butter, wheat, orange juice, furniture, wine, beer. The president swore to many laggards and to all Republicans who voted for him, that he would defend later on, on other issues, if their voters chose to punish them.

On the other hand, the leaders of the most powerful of all American labour unions swore that labour would never forget the votes of congressmen and women who had voted for the agreement. Labour would do its punishing. Right up to the last moment on Wednesday evening, as the vote was being tallied, the question remained whether the Congress would be more moved by Mr Perot's dread of a great job exodus to the south or by the president's warning that to reject the agreement would leave the United States as the weakest of the big powers in all future free trade discussions. But a morning-after check of the Congressional voters' motives revealed that the memory had not faded of Mr Perot being re-cast in the role of a meanie, nor of Mr Gore's decency and his surprising revelation of Mr Perot's personal free trade zone in Texas. A California congressman, totting up the vote and the rather amazing 34 majority for the president, summed it up – the Perot-Gore debate was the moment the dam burst.

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