The Performance of Politics

The Performance of Politics 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd i 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:020:20:02 PPMM 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd iiii 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:020:20:02 PPMM The Performance of Politics Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power QW jeffrey c. alexander 1 2010 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd iiiiii 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:020:20:02 PPMM 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alexander, Jeffrey C., 1947 The performance of politics : Obama’s victory and the democratic struggle for power / Jeffrey C. Alexander. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-974446-6 1. Presidents—United States—Election—2008. 2. Obama, Barack. 3. Performance art—Political aspects–United States. 4. United States—Politics and government—2001–2009. I. Title. E906.A44 2010 324.973'0931—dc22 2010007928 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd iivv 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:020:20:02 PPMM For Morel, who shared it all 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd v 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:030:20:03 PPMM A Symbol . always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible. —Coleridge 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd vvii 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:030:20:03 PPMM Contents Acknowledgments, ix Preface, xi Prologue, 1 part i power, performance, and representation chapter one Civil Sphere and Public Drama, 7 chapter two Becoming a Collective Representation, 17 chapter three Spirit of the Ground Game, 39 part ii heroes, binaries, and boundaries chapter four Imagining Heroes, 63 chapter five Working the Binaries, 89 chapter six Walking the Boundaries, 111 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd vviiii 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:030:20:03 PPMM viii contents part iii victory and defeat chapter seven Celebrity Metaphor, 163 chapter eight Palin Effect, 193 chapter nine Financial Crisis, 243 Epilogue, 267 Note on Concept and Method, 275 Appendix, 297 Notes, 305 Index, 000 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd vviiiiii 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:030:20:03 PPMM Acknowledgments rom january to may 2009 i was a senior fellow at the F Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and was supported also by a sabbatical leave from Yale University. The Kluge resi- dency greatly facilitated the completion of this book, and I thank the Kluge staff and especially its director, Carolyn Brown, for their assistance; I also thank Yale for its continuing support. Andreas Hess and Isaac Reed were especially helpful read- ers of this manuscript. I benefi ted also from suggestions by Peter Beilharz, Werner Binder, Elizabeth Breese, Donald Green, Mark Haugaard, Ron Jacobs, Wade Kenney, Peter Kivisto, Richard McCoy, Giuseppe Sciortino, Steven Skowronek, Norma Thompson, Vered Vinitsky-Seroussi, and student fellows at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. Marshall Ganz made possible my connection with the Obama ground game in Denver, Colorado. I am grateful to four New York Times journalists who covered the 2008 presidential campaign—John M. Broder, Jodi Kantor, Michael Powell, and Janny Scott—for allowing me to interview them at length. Katherine Venegas, a Field Organizer for the Obama campaign in Colorado, extended me the same privilege, and included me in her Pueblo group at Camp Obama in Denver in September, 2008. Nadine Amalfi supplied much-appreciated administrative assistance. James Cook, my editor at Oxford University Press, offered helpful editorial suggestions. I owe a signifi cant debt as well to my research assistant on this project, Bernadette Jaworsky. 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd iixx 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:030:20:03 PPMM 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd x 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:030:20:03 PPMM Preface hy another book about obama and mccain when there W have been so many and after all this time? That was 2008, after all. It was only yesterday, but it often seems so long ago, almost ancient history. The answer, I hope, is that this book is different from other “campaign books” in ways that are more likely to stand the test of time. The Performance of Politics is very much about that 2008 presidential campaign, but it is about a lot more as well. My ambition is to provide a new explanation of victory and defeat in 2008, but also a new way of looking at the democratic struggle for power in America and beyond. Three types of books are written about presidential campaigns. One is by insiders, the people who organize and run them. Another is by journalists, the people who report on them as they unfold. The third is by academics, who make claims for greater objectivity because they have observed the campaign from the outside. The best of each genre has its virtues that make them essential reading for every student of political life, but in their more conventional forms they fall short. Books by insiders often become too personal, veering from game plans to bragging and score settling. Books by social scientists often become too objective, putting what are nuanced and uncertain events into neat and tidy conceptual boxes, passing off broad demographic correlations as causal explanations, and present- ing outcomes as if they were determined in advance—by “society.” Journalistic accounts too often focus on individuals and their biographies. They can veer from recounting to gossip, turning off-the-record interviews into juicy nuggets that make news for a day. 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd xxii 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:030:20:03 PPMM xii preface Insider accounts provide us with new backstage knowledge, but they are way too inside to give us perspective on the whys and whats of the campaign. Aca- demic accounts provide all sorts of contextualizing knowledge, but they are far too outside to provide convincing explanations of victory and defeat at this time and in this place. Journalists are actually in a better position. Reporters create what the public sees, hears, and reads every day about the campaign, and sophisticated political journalists produce narrative streams of nuance and complexity. Nei- ther an insider nor an academic has ever produced a great book about a political campaign. Political journalists have, though they have been few and far between. Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960 was the best book written in the last century about an American political campaign.1 The Performance of Politics is between inside and outside. I look carefully at the strategies and statements of those who planned and directed the 2008 campaign, and I pay close attention to the broader contexts that defi ned its social back- drop. I also enmesh myself in the day-to-day reports of political media not only to glean detailed information but also to gain access to the symbolic fl ows that decide campaigns, the cultural frameworks that journalists not only referee but also help create. In the pages that follow I investigate the back and forth between Barack Obama and John McCain from June to November of 2008. My focus is micro- scopic, but the big picture is never left entirely behind. Chapter 1 is mainly about this big picture, and it’s a bit abstract, a little academic. My argument is that the democratic struggle for power is not much determined by demography or even substantive issues and that it’s not very rational, either. Political struggle is moral and emotional. It’s about “meaning,” about sym- bolically “constructing” candidates so they appear to be on the sunny rather than the shadowy side of the street. When they run for offi ce, politicians are less public debaters, public servants, or policy wonks than they are performers. They and their production teams work on their image, and political struggle is about projecting these cultural constructs to voters. Political journalism mediates these projections of image in an extraordinarily powerful way. My discussion of these broad issues is mercifully brief. Soon we enter into the concreteness of the 2008 presidential campaigns. Part I describes how Obama and McCain tried to become symbols of Ameri- can democracy, each in his own way. Obama often succeeded. People saw him as real and authentic, if sometimes too earnest. McCain couldn’t seem to make his political performances fl y. He was such a bad actor that voters often felt he seemed to be acting, following a script rather than being himself. But there was another reason for McCain’s diffi culty to symbolize effectively. In 2008, concerns about terrorism were fading. McCain could be narrated as a hero pretty easily in a time 000_Alexander_FM.indd0_Alexander_FM.indd xxiiii 66/17/2010/17/2010 110:20:030:20:03 PPMM preface xiii of military crisis but not so easily on the domestic scene.

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