Authenticity over a beer

Authenticity over a beer

by digby

Michael Tomasky speak, you listen. He points out something that should make the beltway gasbags and kewl kidz think a little bit: all the politicians they code as authentic are nuttier than a Payday bar. Also too:
I can’t tell you the number of straight-news reporters who’ve said to me over the years something like: Yes, okay, Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham or whoever may be a little out there, but you know what? At least he really means it. What you see with him is what you get. To which I would rejoin, well, that’s fine, but so what; all that means to me is that when he starts World War III or resegregates our school system via his court appointments or gives the 1 percent another whopping-big tax cut, he’ll be doing so sincerely. But this (as I knew going in) was always a loser of an argument to an objective reporter, because they divorce themselves emotionally from the whole idea of outcomes.

And this is how political journalists end up assessing politicians with such a preponderant emphasis on their authenticity. They aren’t allowed to make subjective ideological judgments, so they make them on the basis of personality. It’s why they dwell excessively on matters like explaining to you which candidate you’d rather have a beer with. That was one great scam, by the way, back in 2000—persuading the American public that they’d all rather have a beer with the candidate (Dubya) who didn’t drink beer!
This is the important point:
... I don’t care whether any of them is authentic. I just care what they do. I’d much rather have a president who inauthentically raises the minimum wage and passes paid family leave than one who authentically eliminates the federal minimum wage and does what the Chamber of Commerce tells him to do on all such matters.

Agreed.  Moreover, we simply cannot know if these people are "authentic" anyway.  They probably don't know if they're "authentic." We're all acting in public in certain ways, and politicians do it more than most.  Politics is, by definition, an artificial act --- nobody's being "real". What these Villagers think is authentic is really good acting.

Now people do use heuristics to assess these politicians and there's no arguing with that. It's a fundamental feature of human communication and it's pretty sophisticated. But it's also colored by others' interpretations, which is where this "authentic" stuff has an effect. There are many ways to look at certain behaviors but when the press decides that it represents something specific about the person's character, many people will go along. Life is short, most are too busy to go too far into the weeds.

Anyway, it's a good piece as is this one by Elias Isquith at Salon which looks at this from a slightly different angle: politicians gonna politic.

Here's a definition for you:

Politics: the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.

Everything about that is maneuvering, negotiating, positioning, posturing and persuading. Being "authentic" is about as important as having curly hair is to being successful at that.

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