Pictures speak as loud as words of Obama’s communications breakdown

ONE of the gigs worth your attention next weekend is the Trim Swift Festival.

You shouldn’t avoid it just because I’ll be a minor player at the event. Just how minor depends entirely on the mood of the master of ceremonies in charge of the Friday night dinner/discussion.

If George Hook is in good humour, I might get to speak for three minutes. If he’s not, it’ll be even shorter. One way or the other, luminaries such as Noel Whelan, Seán Gallagher, and John Waters will be there to startle, amuse, inform, and entertain. Not to mention corruption expert Elaine Byrne, who last year did so charming a riff about the educational value of card playing that it would make anybody want to take a quick lesson in whist, poker or 25.

Not bridge, though: Someone at my table who seemed to be in the know warned that bridge was where half the marital infidelity in Ireland started. Who knew?

Even more surprising was impersonator Rory Bremner. Very clever. Very smart mimicry of public figures, whose impersonation of US President Barack Obama discomfited anybody who had welcomed Obama’s election as heralding a new era in American politics. Bremner, in one short skit, wrote an end to the perception of Obama as a great communicator.

Glancing around the tables as he did his take-off, I noticed that members of the audience had started to mimic the mimic — to move their heads from one side to another as does Obama as he makes points using autocue. That’s the essence of great physical satire — it crystallises what you half-realised about an individual. And what Bremner’s impersonation of Obama did was present him in a way that made us like the president less.

The president, as presented by the mimic, was predictable, patronising and phoning it in. Not bothering to connect; academic, conceptual; distant, disengaged. Lecturing, rather than leading. It was accurate. That was the awful bit. It was the truth, presented as fun. It made sense of the bitter disappointment felt by so many Americans, not all of them Democrats, who had invested so many of their hopes and dreams in Obama just a couple of years previously.

To some extent, that disappointment was inevitable, because of the disproportionately high expectations generated around the man and the economic context in which he must operate. To some extent, too, its roots are to be found in policy decisions.

Obamacare — successfully defended last week in the courts — satisfied nobody. Democrats regard it as a watered-down version of what they had hoped for. Republicans regard it as the legislative embodiment of all Obama stands for — hence Mitt Romney’s promise to unwind it the moment he reaches the White House, if he’s elected president.

But the key reason underlying the disappointment with Obama is his failure to communicate. Which seems a contradiction, since his communicative abilities seemed so impregnably excellent when he was running for president. He could write, as demonstrated by two non-fiction bestsellers. To a nation weary of a president given to slogans and deeply-held shallow certainties, the cool, high-intellectual contrast Obama provided could not have been more welcome. During the election, when John McCain veered between temper loss and infuriated confusion, “No Drama Obama” was the appealing counterpoint.

Just as the money starts to flow to the candidate who is seen to capture the public imagination, so does subliminal support. Those who fall even a little in love with a political figure project onto that figure the characteristics most desired by the observer, whether that observer is a voter or a media practitioner. As people fell more than a little in love with Obama, that happened to an unprecedented extent, greatly helped by his being largely unknown and demonstrably unknowable. He could personify everything the onlooker wanted him to be.

Photographs of him seemed to convey more than the visual facts of the picture. Take one of him speaking on a stormy night, his face streaming with rain. It became one of the most popular posters sold by The New York Times. Why, since all it showed was a handsome man with a wet face? Because the viewer or owner of the picture provided the added significance, the extra meaning. He was the right man in the right place and every photograph conveyed what the public wanted it to convey.

That stopped astonishingly quickly after he became president. In too many photographs the president, whether smiling or serious, had a preoccupied air, as if his mind had moved to a more important place. He seems unable to deploy the complete live-in-the-moment, attentive tunnel -vision Bill Clinton always gave the people around him. Except, notably, in the quintessential photograph showing him huddled among a bunch of administrative VIPs, watching the live feed of the destruction of Osama bin Laden, looking shockingly unlike a commander-in-chief.

The pictures that never appeared say as much as the ones that did. When kilometres of oil slick devastated wildlife, tourism, and fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, the president should have been there. He wasn’t. The pictures of him onsite should have dominated media. They didn’t.

Every young TV reporter gets it drummed into them: “Write to the pictures.” If the pictures are going to define the words of the story told by TV, then it’s up to the politician to make sure the picture is right. If the pictures are going to convey a reality to those who don’t read or hear the words of the report, then it’s doubly important to get them right. When BP dumped oil all over their lives, the fisherfolk, hoteliers, and children watching oil- coated birds needed visual evidence that the president cared. They didn’t get it.

BUT it’s his spoken communication that has most clearly fallen short of what was expected of him. In speeches and press conferences, he complains, rather than inspires. He complains about processes the majority of Americans neither know about nor care about. He complains about the failure of bipartisanship as if it were something for which he carried no responsibility. However, as the latest volume in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B Johnson demonstrates, getting around entrenched Republicans can be done — by a driven president who understands politicians and how to persuade, threaten and seduce them. This is not Obama’s strong suit, but complaining about it in public is not the way to fix it.

Obama faces into his re-election battle having lost much of his hold on public imagination through poor communication.

The urgent imperative is for him to change his words, change the way he presents those words and get away from TV appearances that look like the university lectures of an overly cool and detached professor. It’s still possible to re-create the magical connection he once had with supporters. Just about.