I’d accepted as one of those givens, because I’d heard enough people say it, that one of the reasons Nixon lost out to Kennedy in the 60’s election was the media-savviness of Kennedy.
“People who heard the first televised debate on the radio thought that Nixon had won, while the TV viewers thought that Kennedy had won. However, since far more people watched the debate on television than listened to it on radio, this was a net gain for Kennedy. Nixon was so upset by his performance (and sickly physical appearance) in the first debate that he refused to watch any video of the debate for the rest of his life.”
Nixon apparently refused to wear make-up, and looked grim as a result.
But this (again from Everything Bad is Good For You) is a really interesting take:
“What if it wasn’t Nixon’s lack of make-up that troubled the TV watchers? After all, Nixon did turn out to be shifty and untrustworthy in the end. Perhaps all those voters who thought he had won after they heard the debate on the radio or read the transcript in the papers simply didn’t have access to the range of emotional information conveyed by television. Nixon lost on TV because he didn’t look like someone you would want as president.”
This idea – of mass emotional intelligence working via TV – is tantalising. And I’d love to be able to wholeheartedly believe it. But the Clinton/Lewinsky, Blair/Iraq style memories bring me up a little short.
The thing, I suppose, that worries me is not that EQ can’t work. It’s when it doesn’t. What if the mechanisms for making corrections are much more awkward than a more ‘rational’ approach? What if you stay wrong for longer, in the same way a Juliet can be blind to a Romeo’s faults? And if there is this divide, then which is preferable: a system that is more frequently flawed but easier to correct, or a system that is less frequently flawed but harder to correct?
I’d plump for the former.