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The new politics meets theold rhetoric: New directionsin campaign communicationresearchDavid L. Swanson aa Assistant Professor of Speech , Kansas State College ofPittsburgPublished online: 05 Jun 2009.

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THE NEW POLITICS MEETS THE OLD RHETORIC:NEW DIRECTIONS IN

CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

David L. Swanson

POLITICAL campaign speaking haslong been of interest to students of

speech communication. The quadren-nial symposia on campaign rhetoric thathave appeared in this journal and themuster roll of theses and dissertationsstudying the political speaking of somemore or less significant personality attestto the rhetorical critic-analyst's historicconcern with campaign advocacy. Thisinterest has been mirrored in politicalscience and sociology by a quarter-century of campaign study seeking toidentify the causes and correlates of vot-ing behavior.

Outside the academic community thepopular imagination has been fired bythe notion of a "new politics" which, ac-cording to some, is effecting "a funda-mental transformation" in the nature ofAmerican political campaigning.1 Al-though the precise dimensions of thesedevelopments are difficult to discern, itis clear that new communication strate-gies and methods are being attributed topolitical campaigners.

Despite all this popular interest andscholarly activity, however, disappoint-ingly little is known about the operationof campaign communication in the con-temporary election contest.2 Campaign

Mr. Swanson is Assistant Professor of Speech atKansas State College of Pittsburg.

1 Harold Mendelsohn and Irving Crespi,Polls, Television, and the New Politics (Scran-ton, Pa.: Chandler Pub. Co., 1970), p. ix.

2 Ithiel de Sola Pool, for example, concludedin "TV: A New Dimension in Politics," Ameri-can Voting Behavior, ed. Eugene Burdick and

research has little to offer the increasingnumbers of academics, candidates, andvoters who turn to it for help in sepa-rating the myths of the new politics fromthe realities of electoral behavior. Thisdearth of pertinent study may be par-ticularly stinging to speech communica-tion researchers, who presumably have amajor interest in the new politics buthave thus far failed to confront this"challenge to students of communica-tion."3

It is the position of this essay that themost productive investigation of the is-sues and methods of the new politicsmust be rooted in a reconceptualizationof campaign communication and of therole of the communication researcher.After briefly sketching the nature of thenew politics, the essay analyzes the per-spectives and limitations of voting be-havior and campaign communication re-search and suggests some new directionsthat investigators might profitably ex-plore.

Arthur J. Brodbeck (Glencoe, Ill.: The FreePress, 1959), p. 236: "We know little about thepolitical effects of TV—or of any of the massmedia, for that matter. Politicians want toknow what TV will do, and social scientists can-not begin to answer. . . . What effects do dif-ferent campaign methods and messages have?"More recently, James H. McBath and Walter R.Fisher noted, "no method presently exists bywhich campaign communication can be ana-lyzed and evaluated to the mutual satisfaction ofthose who are party to the process and thosewho study it." See "Persuasion in PresidentialCampaign Communication," QJS, 55 (Feb.1969), 17.

3 Pool, p. 242.

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32 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH

THE "NEW POLITICS"

As with many popular labels, the"new politics" may be defined moreeasily by reference to the sinister andsensational images it evokes than theempirical realities it denotes. Those whouse the term, however, would probablyagree in highlighting the importance ofthree features of "new-style" politicalcampaigns.

First, the new politics seems to be un-dergirded by the assumption— fueled bythe increasing sophistication of the be-havioral sciences and popularized someyears ago by Eugene Burdick's The 480*—that the most effective campaign strate-gy is that which is grounded in "scien-tific" theory and research. The hunchesand intuitions of professional politiciansand ward-heelers are thought to be lessreliable guides to action than empirical-ly derived data and theory.5 Campaignmanagers of the new politics seek tocodify "a science of electioneering/'6

which underscores their naive faith inthe social sciences, and assert that "de-cisions are finally beginning to be basedon rational information."7

The impact of this information—which includes data from panel studiesof voting behavior and extensive pollsof the electorate—on campaign strategymay be profound. The conclusions itsuggests may be used to select the "is-

4 New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. This is afictionalized account of the computer simula-tion conducted during the 1960 presidentialcampaign reported in Ithiel de Sola Pool,Robert P. Abelson, and Samuel L. Popkin,Candidates, Issues, and Strategies (Cambridge,Mass.: MJ.T. Press, 1964).

5 See Robert MacNeil, The People Machine:The Influence of Television on American Poli-tics (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 221-222.

6 Arthur J. Brodbeck, "The Principles ofPermanence and Change: Electioneering andPsychotherapy Compared," in Burdick andBrodbeck, p. 416.

7 "Campaign Management Grows Into Na-tional Industry," Congressional Quarterly, 5Apr. 1968, p. 707.

sues" and "images" that will be empha-sized in the campaign, to match appealsand message formats with target publics,to determine geographic and temporalpriorities on the expenditure of cam-paign resources, and to ascertain howcommunication methods and techniquesmay be used for maximum effect. To as-sist them in making these complex de-cisions, candidates have found it neces-sary to enlist the services of a growingcadre of professional campaign man-agers and consultants.8

Second, campaigns which are cited asexamples of the new politics seem tomake extensive use of the mass media ofcommunication and of television partic-ularly. Defeated 1970 Ohio U. S. Senatecandidate John Glenn has charged:"Politics today is money and televisiontime."9 Spending for the broadcastmedia quadrupled between the 1956 and1968 national campaigns.10 The fact thatmore money was spent for local tele-vision time in the three-way race forU.S. Senator in New York during the1970 campaigns than was spent for na-tional television by the 1960 Republicanand Democratic presidential campaignssuggests that the importance of thisvisual medium is growing rapidly at alllevels of campaigning.11

The competition among the candi-dates for exposure in the national newsmedia may have changed some tradi-tional ideas about the rationale under-lying campaign activities. As Richard M.Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg ob-serve, "the campaign is important inproviding the candidate with somethingto do that can be televised, photo-graphed, and written about for national

8 Ibid.9 Quoted in "CBS Reports: Campaign '70—

Television and Politics," C.B.S. telecast, 20 Oct.1970, Mike Wallace, Reporter.

10 "Electronic Politics: The Image Game,"Time, 21 Sept. 1970, p. 43.

11 "CBS Reports."

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THE NEW POLITICS MEETS THE OLD RHETORIC 33

consumption."12 They emphasize that"a two-minute clip on each of the threenetwork news shows during the cam-paign will yield the candidate an audi-ence of many tens of millions of Ameri-cans!"13 Further, the television newsaudience represents an "almost perfect"demographic cross-section of the elec-torate and thus affords the candidate anopportunity to address a more hetero-geneous group than the enthusiastic sup-porters who habitually show up at cam-paign rallies and speeches.14 The desireto exploit the considerable advantages ofcampaign news coverage and televisiondocumentary and public service pro-gramming has imbued customary cam-paign practices—rallies, speeches, "prop-stops"—with the flavor of "pseudoevents."15

Finally, the televised messages of"new-style" campaigns seem to de-emphasize more traditional forms of ap-peal—such as the broadcast of a politicalspeech by the candidate—in favor of spotannouncements or "commercials." Ex-penditures on these brief messages dou-bled between the 1964 and 1968 cam-paigns, while money spent for longerproductions remained constant.16 Mac-Neil has found that "in terms of money,air time and creative energy, the politi-cal commercial is now forcing otherforms of political television off the air.In some recent campaigns it has virtual-ly taken over all television time boughtfor the candidates."17

The importance of this growing re-liance on different types of programmingis suggested by C. David Mortensen'sfinding that the format of political tele-

12 The Real Majority (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970), p. 217.

13 Ibid., p. 214.14 MacNeil, p. 184.15 See Daniel Boorstin, The Image (New

York: Atheneum Publishers, 1962), pp. 11-12.16 "Electronic Politics," p. 43.17 MacNeil, p. 194.

vision messages tends to influence thecontent of discussion.18 As the "commer-cial" format becomes more predomi-nant, the nature of content seems toplace increasing emphasis on "images"of candidates and over-simplified anddramatized representations of campaignissues. MacNeil's conclusion that in the1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, "the ap-pearance and behavior of the candidates,the way in which their personalitieswere transmitted, overshadowed whatthey said" suggests that exploitation ofthe television medium may have far-reaching effects on the character of cam-paign communication.19 McBath andFisher theorize that political communi-cation today is "more akin to persua-sion in advertising" than to other formsof advocacy.20 Some six million com-mercials were aired in support ofpolitical candidates in 1968, and it isperhaps both the quantity and qualityof these messages which have chieflyspawned the fears of "manipulation,""electronic hucksterism," and the syn-thetic manufacture of non-existent quali-ties of candidates which cloud our per-ceptions of the new politics.

Generally the differences between tra-ditional campaigns and the efforts of thenew politics are matters of emphasis anddegree. Candidates have always soughtto persuade the voters by the most ef-fective means at their disposal, and im-ages have always figured prominently inthe evaluations of citizens who seek toabstract complex issues into simpleterms. It may thus be the apparentability of "new-style" campaigners todo a more effective job of what candi-

18 "The Influence of Television on Policy Dis-cussion," QJS, 54 (Oct. 1968), 277-281. See alsoMortensen's "The Influence of Role Structureon Message Content in Political Telecast Cam-paigns," Central States Speech Journal, 19(Winter 1968), 279-285.

19 MacNeil, pp. 167-168.20 McBath and Fisher, p . 18.

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34 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH

dates have long sought to do that is atthe root of the new politics. The key tothis seemingly greater effectiveness liesin communication methods and strate-gies and it is in dealing with this cruxof the new politics that speech communi-cation and voting studies have beenoblique.

SPEECH COMMUNICATION STUDIESOF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING

Studies of campaign communicationin the speech field have traditionallybeen the domain of the scholar of publicaddress. While some recent research hasshown an encouraging willingness to de-part from the speech-centered focus, thethrust of speech communication studiesof political campaigning still empha-sizes partisan speechmaking.21 Evenwhen the subject of study is the evolu-tion of an entire presidential campaign,the touchstones of investigation tend toremain selected speeches of the candi-dates.22

Such preoccupation with oratoryseems to be an inappropriate response tothe new politics. Implicit in contempo-rary political practice are assumptionsthat television campaign commercials,filmed biographies of candidates, con-trived, publicity-attracting campaignevents, propagation of candidates' im-ages, and the formulation of broad

21 See Martha Thomson Barclay, "DistaffCampaigning in the 1964 and 1968 PresidentialElections," Central States Speech Journal, 21(Summer 1970), 117-122; Harold F. Harding,"Speaking in the 1968 Presidential Campaign,"The President: Rex, Princeps, Imperatort ed.Joseph M. Ray (El Paso: Texas Western Press,1969), pp. 86-99; J. J. Makay, "George C. Wal-lace: Southern Spokesman With a NorthernAudience," Central States Speech Journal, 19(Fall 1968), 202-208; and Sarah E. Sanderson,

"Controls on the Presentation of the 1960 Nomi-nation Speeches for President—An AnecdotalAccount," Western Speech, 35 (Spring 1971),130-134.

22 See, for example, Bernard L. Brock, "1968Democratic Campaign: A Political Upheaval,"QJS, 55 (Feb. 1969), 26-35.

strategies of issue selection, response toopposition tactics, choice of communi-cation media, and timing of campaigntactics are all important facets of cam-paign communications. That only a mi-nority of the voters ever hear a candi-date deliver a speech in a presidentialcampaign, either live or via the massmedia, and that voters who attend tospeeches are usually partisans who werepredisposed to support the candidateanyway is a lesson modern campaignershave learned well.23 Campaign speakingthus represents a relatively small part ofa campaign's total communications pro-gram.24 Given the nature of the newpolitics, myopic concern with speech-making to the exclusion of other formsof communication seems anachronistic.

Some important exceptions to thisspeech orientation in campaign researchshould be noted. The most valuable andcomprehensive campaign communica-tion study, however, has been conductedoutside the speech field. Perhaps themost complete analysis of "new-style"communications methods and strategiesis The Political Persuaders: The Tech-niques of Modern Campaigns, by politi-cal scientist Dan Nimmo.25 Of a morespecialized nature are Kurt and GladysEngel Lang's Politics and Television28

and Television in Politics: Its Uses andInfluence, by Jay G. Blumler and DenisMcQuail.27 In the speech literature,Mortensen's work with varying formatsof political telecasts has already beencited. Also of interest is a recent study of"Factors in a Presidential Candidate'sImage" by Bill O. Kjeldahl, Carl W.

23 Karl A. Lamb and Paul A. Smith, Cam-paign Decision-Making: The Presidential Elec-tion of 1964 (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Pub.Co., 1968), pp. 93-94. See also The Real Ma-jority, pp . 214-215.

24 Mendelsohn and Crespi, p . 301.25 Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970.26 Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968.27 Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969.

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THE NEW POLITICS MEETS THE OLD RHETORIC 35

Carmichael, and Robert J. Mertz.28 Itis regrettable that such investigations arerelatively rare and normally take placeoutside the speech discipline.

A second feature of speech communi-cation studies of political campaigning isconfusion and ambiguity in the deriva-tion and application of standards ofjudgment. The judgmental or evalua-tive component of analysis is, of course,particularly important if study is to con-tribute to theory-building. Herbert W.Simons' observation that "designed formicroscopic analysis of particularspeeches, the standard tools of rhetoricalcriticism are ill-suited for unravellingthe complexity of discourse in socialmovements or for capturing its grandflow" describes by analogy the difficultyof the researcher who seeks to study apresidential campaign.20

One response to this problem hasbeen to offer descriptive studies that at-tempt to avoid making evaluative judg-ments. Political scientist Stephen L.Wasby recently observed that "it hasbeen the social psychologists and politi-cal scientists who have looked at com-munications effects, while the rhetori-cians have tended to remain relativelyfixed on the communication itself."30

Illustrative of this approach is Makay'sanalysis of George Wallace's strategiesin the 1964 Maryland primary electioncampaign. The author describes what heconsiders to be the three predominantstrategies of the Wallace campaign, butoffers little indication of their success orany real basis for assessing the rhetoricalwisdom of their selection.31

28 Speech Monographs, 38 (June 1971), 129-131.

29 "Requirements, Problems, and Strategies:A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements,"QJS, 56 (Feb. 1970), 2.

30 "Rhetoricians and Political Scientists:Some Lines of Converging Interest," SouthernSpeech Journal, 36 (Spring 1971), 238.

31 J. J. Makay, "The Rhetorical Strategies ofGovernor George Wallace in the 1964 Mary-

A second response has offered essen-tially intuitive generalizations about therelative importance of campaign per-suasion. The reliability of these judg-ments is often questionable. After de-scribing features of some whistle-stopspeeches made by Charles Percy in the1966 Illinois senatorial campaign, JerryE. Mandel concludes: "From the num-ber of votes he gathered from the area ofthe tour, it appears that his image pres-entation was quite successful."32 Cri-tiquing this article, Anderson identifiesthe common shortcomings of such hastydeductions: "The author has wrenchedthe speeches of a whistle-stop tour fromthe total persuasive environment of thecampaign. Media influences such as tele-vision are neglected. Partisan predisposi-tions and social class variables. are ne-glected. Voter perceptions are neglected.Therefore, it seems, effective rhetoricalanalysis is neglected."33

An additional example of the difficul-ties involved in trying to deduce thepersuasiveness of campaign rhetoric isprovided by Brock's analysis of EugeneMcCarthy's performance in the 1968New Hampshire and Wisconsin presi-dential primary elections. After describ-ing the campaign as an essentially "dov-ish" rejection of Lyndon Johnson's"hawkish" Vietnam policy, Brock con-cludes that McCarthy's votes in thoseraces was a vindication of his rhetoricalposition.34 Empirical data compiled byUniversity of Michigan Survey ResearchCenter polls, however, show that "threeout of five of the McCarthy supportersin New Hampshire believed that theJohnson administration was wrong on

land Primary," Southern Speech Journal, 36(Winter 1970), 164-175.

32 "The Presentation of Image in Charles H.Percy's Whistle-Stop Tour of 1966," CentralStates Speech Journal, 21 (Winter 1970), 216.

33 Robert O. Anderson, comments in "Fo-rum," Central States Speech Journal, 22 (Spring1971), 65-66.

34 Brock, pp. 26-28.

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Vietnam because it was not hawkishenough, not because it was too hawk-ish."35 Scammon and Wattenberg's con-clusion that "the candidates and thepress were talking Vietnam; the voterswere not voting it" suggests that gapsmay exist between the rhetoric of thepolitical candidates and the realities ofthe voters' motivations in the pollingbooth.3® By attempting to infer rhetori-cal effectiveness from speeches and theirresponses, charges and their counter-charges, critics of campaign communica-tion may be describing a complicatedgame of "rhetorical chess" which hasvery little to do with the reasons under-lying voters' behavior.

Until speech communication researchof political campaigning squarely facesthe new politics with its multitude offormats and tactics and offers credibleexplanations for the effects of politicalmessages and strategies, its value toscholars outside our field will probablycontinue to be limited.

THE STUDY OF VOTING BEHAVIOR

The study of voting behavior has beencarried on in the framework of two dif-ferent perspectives. The first views vot-ing as the result of forces combining toframe each voter's "sociological make-up."37 This makeup is comprised of twokinds of influences—the voter's demo-graphic background and his interper-sonal environment of associates andopinion leaders. The second view focus-

35 The Real Majority, p . 91.36 Ibid., p . 93.37 This view is perhaps best illustrated in

the voting studies of Columbia University'sBureau of Applied Social Research. For examplesof these studies see Paul F. Lazarsfeld, BernardBerelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People'sChoice (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce,1944); Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, andWilliam McPhee, Voting (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1954); and Elihu Katz and PaulF. Lazarsfeld, Personal. Influence (New York:The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964).

es on "intervening variables" in the vot-ing decision, those political and personalattitudes and predispositions which in-tervene between the more distant socio-logical correlates of voting and a citi-zen's electoral preference.38 The methodsof both kinds of research are essentiallyrelational; that is, they seek to establishcorrelations between distinctive votingpatterns and either sociological or atti-tudinal characteristics of voters, indi-vidually or in groups.39

The utility of these empirical studiesto both practitioners and students ofcommunication in the new politics is re-stricted by conceptual limitations similarto those which mark the study of politi-cal speechmaking. First, and perhapsmost important, these studies tend to beself-consciously not communication ori-ented. They study election outcomes andattempt correlations between votingchoices and demographic characteristics,attitudes, or experiences, but have notdirectly attacked the problem of deter-mining to what extent, if at all, persua-sive campaign communication entersthis process as a variable which may in-fluence the final result.40 Consequently,there is a paucity of study of the impact

38 The best-known practitioners of this vieware the researchers of the Political BehaviorProgram of the Survey Research Center of theUniversity of Michigan's Institute for Social Re-search. Their principal studies are AngusCampbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E. Miller,The Voter Decides (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peter-son, 1954); Angus Campbell and Homer C.Cooper, Group Differences in Attitudes andVotes (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Survey ResearchCenter, Univ. of Michigan, 1956); Angus Camp-bell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, andDonald E. Stokes, The American Voter (NewYork: John Wiley, 1960); and Angus Campbell,Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, andDonald E. Stokes, Elections and the PoliticalOrder (New York: John Wiley, 1966).

39 T h e most comprehensive recent summaryof voting literature is David O. Sears, "PoliticalBehavior," The Handbook of Social Psychology,ed. Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, 2d ed.(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969), 5, 315-458.

40 For an explanation of the rationale, seeCampbell, Gurin, and Miller, pp . 83-84.

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THE NEW POLITICS MEETS THE OLD RHETORIC 37

of campaign communication per se andmany of our "insights" into this genreof influence are second-hand deductionsbased on ersatz evidence.

Second, empirical voting studies havebeen largely paradigm-free.41 In themanner of much behavioral research,they have not normally attempted tobuild comprehensive theory from theirfindings. By being particularized andoften non-theoretical, they have typi-cally offered the reader solitary variablesor combinations of a few variables with-out any accompanying sense of their im-portance or of their ability to explainthe vote-decision process.42 In so doing,such studies have not faced some of themost difficult and complex questions in-volved in the challenging problem ofunderstanding how campaign communi-cation works.

Despite the proliferation of investiga-tions of voting behavior and campaignrhetoric, then, our knowledge of whetherthe communication methods of the"new" politics are any more successfulthan the "old" remains meager. Politi-cal scientists and sociologists have stud-ied the subject with a variety of perspec-tives and methodologies but a commonlack of interest in communication andpersuasion as the key ingredient of thenew politics. Speech communication re-searchers have, in the main, persisted infealty to an outmoded view of cam-paigns as exercises in political oratoryand are hard-pressed to explain voters'responses to political persuasion.

41 This is less true o£ the "intervening vari-ables" studies, which attempt to account forvoting behavior by reference to the influenceof certain attitudes, than o£ other approaches tovoting research.

42 Sidney Verba, Small Groups and PoliticalBehavior (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,1961), p. 4. In this respect, voting literature re-flects the same "absence of theoretical moorings"noted by C. David Mortensen in "The Statusof Small Group Research," QJS, 56 (Oct. 1970),304.

These shortcomings are largely mat-ters of focus and conceptualization.Their remedy requires, as a first step,identifying research strategies and per-spectives which directly confront the is-sues and questions raised by the chang-ing role of persuasive communicationin the contemporary political campaign.

SOME NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CAMPAIGNCOMMUNICATION RESEARCH

Productive study of the communica-tions of the new politics seems to re-quire abandoning the political speech-making orientation in favor of a "full-blown" view of rhetoric in the campaigncontext. If one accepts Brockriede's char-acterization of "rhetoric" as "the studyof how interpersonal relationships andattitudes are influenced within a situa-tional context," the scope of the critic-analyst's inquiry is greatly expanded.43

The full range of strategy formulation,issue selection, image presentation, com-munication transmission, message for-mat choice, and other features of cam-paign decision-making become inter-woven in the fabric of the "rhetoric" ofthe campaign. In approach, at least, thisview is similar to Simons' full-blownview of social movements.44 It requiresthe investigator to look beyond isolated,fragmentary specimens of communica-tion into deeper questions of how cam-paign strategy is formulated, how strate-gy decisions should be made, and how inthe truest sense strategy formulationis the rhetoric of a political campaign.The critic's first task, then, is describingthe broad strategies by which a cam-paign seeks to maximize its chances ofelectoral victory. To study bits andpieces of campaigns without the sense

43 Wayne E. Brockriede, "Dimensions of theConcept of Rhetoric," QJS, 54 (Feb. 1968), 1.

44 Simons, "Requirements, Problems, andStrategies . . ." pp. 1-11.

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of their integration into a strategicwhole is to offer scattered parts of a jig-saw puzzle which lose much of theirmeaning by the fact of their isolation.

Once identified, how are the strategicchoices of campaigners to be judged?We have already seen that attemptingto correlate votes to political speechescan be a hazardous undertaking, as wit-ness the McCarthy rhetoric. That sucha gap between the pronouncements ofthe candidates and the motives of thevoters was not unique to the 1968 cam-paign is suggested by a contest sometwenty years earlier. The Taft-HartleyAct was a major issue in the 1948 Demo-cratic presidential campaign, one whichfigured prominently in campaign ora-tory. Yet at the close of the campaign,seven of every ten adults did not knowwhat the legislation was.45

Argumentative strength and logicalvalidity seem to be equally dangerousstandards for judging the strategies andmessages of the new politics. This istrue most obviously because many ele-ments of strategy are independent of thecontent of campaign messages. Less ob-viously, these traditional standards maybe losing their relevance as the characterof campaign discourse changes. With in-creasing reliance on television to directmessages to the voters, Wyckoff observesthat "the rational import of what [candi-dates] say may be a minimal part of thesentiment that they arouse in viewers."46

The apparent enigma of the halcyon butunsuccessful Adlai Stevenson rhetoricunderscores the futility of attempting toexplain communication effects by refer-ence to traditional standards of rhetori-cal excellence.

After their meticulous study identi-fied the "average" American voter as "a

45 The American Voter, p. 99.46 Gene Wyckoff, The Image Candidates:

American Politics in the Age of Television(New York: MacMillan, 1968), p . 212.

forty-seven-year-old housewife from theoutskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose hus-band is a machinist," Scammon andWattenberg wrote:

To know that the lady in Dayton is afraid towalk the streets alone at night, to know thatshe has a mixed view about blacks and civilrights because before moving to the suburbs shelived in a neighborhood that became all black,to know that her brother-in-law is a policeman,to know that she does not have the money tomove if her new neighborhood deteriorates, toknow that she is deeply distressed that her sonis going to a community junior college whereLSD was found on the campus—to know all thisis the beginning of contemporary political wis-dom.47

Such knowledge, we might append, isalso the beginning of wisdom in evalu-ating the strategies of the new politics.The source of the critic-analyst's judg-ments should come from the votersthemselves. True, we have long paid lip-service to the notion of "effects" as astandard for evaluation but, as we haveseen, attempts to quantify and explainthose effects of political messages havebeen slipshod and of the nature of after-thoughts.

To understand and analyze the basesof the new politics we must face the diffi-cult business of trying to understand theAmerican electorate. This understand-ing—which is, after all, audience analy-sis—requires that we grapple with thediffuse and profuse voting behaviorliterature. Just as the student of Britishpublic address would hardly attempt toanalyze the rhetoric of a Burke or a Pittwithout acquainting himself with thebest available evidence about the tem-per of the times and the audience, soshould the student of contemporarycampaign communication feel a re-sponsibility to familiarize himself withthe available literature in cognate fields

47 The Real Majority, p. 71.

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THE NEW POLITICS MEETS THE OLD RHETORIC 39

which would lend reliability and so-phistication to his judgments. In short,the critic should immerse himself in theparticular situation of an American po-litical campaign in order to determine,insofar as possible, the limits of politicalrhetoric and the ingredients of successfulcampaign persuasion.

Armed with such information, thecritic's approach to particular messagesor specimens of campaign strategyshould be "functional." Brockriede haswritten of the "matrix of interrelatedcontexts, campaigns, and processes"within which rhetorical acts occur.48 Inmass media research, this viewpoint ismirrored by the phenomenalistic ap-proach to explaining the effects of masscommunication, which holds that themessages and influences to which indi-viduals are exposed all combine to affecttheir behavior and, therefore, that par-ticular behaviors cannot normally be ex-plained by reference to specific messageswhich were "effective."49 A "functional"analysis of a persuasive message wouldrecognize the complex integrative na-ture of a sophisticated political cam-paign and begin its study by attemptingto identify the function this particularmessage served in the broader strategyof the total campaign.

The function of a candidate's speechto a political rally in Los Angeles, forexample, may be to have a favorabletwo-minute film clip of the address airedon the television network news programsthat evening. The function of a candi-date's appearance on a news-interviewprogram, similarly, might be to give theelite audience of such programs the ap-pearance of competence, confidence, andthe "presidential" style of behavior.

48 Brockriede, p . 1.49 Joseph T . Klapper, The Effects of Mass

Communication (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press,1960), p . 5. See also Mendelsohn and Crespi, pp.172-175.

Even the function of a speech to a small,local audience may be subtle, as Nimmoobserves:

Campaign mythology says that the purpose be-hind these formal presentations is to enable thecandidate to "speak out on the issues." But, thespeeches are not designed to change people'sminds or even to give an in-depth view of thecandidate's position. The function of discussingissues is more latent than manifest. By quotingfacts and details on a variety of issues the can-didate leaves the impression that he possessesthe knowledge, sophistication, and acumen tohold public office. Indeed, rather than tryingto communicate the content of his speech to hisaudience, he may purposely talk above themand create the aura that he is prepared to dealwith highly complex matters.50

Once the function of a message or tac-tic is identified, the critic should attemptto ascertain whether that function wassuccessfully fulfilled. Reliable empiricalindications of success, through field workof the panel study variety, should besought. If the network news programscarry clips of the candidate's appearancein Los Angeles, then the speech has suc-cessfully fulfilled its function. If suchcontrivances as Richard Nixon's "Hills-boro format" televised discussions withvoters in the 1968 campaign successfullyconveyed the appearance of a competentpresidential style in approaching peopleand problems, then they were function-ally successful.61

A broader level of analysis confront-ing the critic is evaluating the functionitself. Involved in these judgments aresuch questions as "was this functionnecessary to the strategy of the cam-paign?" "could this function have beenserved more effectively or efficiently byother means?"

The critic-analyst's approach to the

50 Dan Nimmo, The Political Persuaders (En-glewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970),pp. 119-120.

51 For a description of this format, see Nim-mo, p. 142.

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40 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH

new politics should therefore be bothmacroscopic and microscopic. At themacroscopic level, he should be con-cerned with the essence of the rhetoricalstrategies of the campaign as they governthe nature of all persuasive activities.At the microscopic level, he should iden-tify the functions of particular tacticsand messages and evaluate their successand wisdom. Above all, the basis for hisjudgments should be the responses of thevoters. To apply other criteria—as of in-tellectual acceptability or logical ade-quacy, for example—to political strate-gies and messages may confirm our no-tions of the low quality of contemporarypolitical discourse (which was alreadyself-evident) and heighten our feelingsof superiority to common voters, butdoes little to help us understand howpolitical communication works inAmerican campaigns of the 1970's. Ifcampaign communication research is tobe put on a sound footing, it requires

objective, empirical investigations ofhow, why, and under what circumstancescommunication can be a variable inelection outcomes.

CONCLUSION

It seems apparent that the study ofcampaign communication must be will-ing to take new and perhaps more de-manding tacks if it is to respond to thechallenge of the new politics. In searchof that "dynamic interaction betweentheory and practice" which is the tra-ditional rationale of communication re-search, it has been suggested that cam-paign communication study might yieldmore knowledge about both campaignsand communication if it were based onan expanded view of its subject, drew itscritical standards from the voters them-selves, and adopted a more sophisticated,functional perspective in the analysis ofspecimens of campaign persuasion.

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