by Jon Ward
On the trail and off the phone
Life inside a presidential campaign bubble has long been maligned as a suffocating, alienating experience.
But there is one way in which living in the political fishbowl has
become strangely liberating. In an age when smartphones have become our
taskmasters, presidential candidates may be the last human beings in the
developed world who, because they are captive to the harsh spotlight of
a campaign, are actually freed from the gadgets that enslave the rest
of us.
At least in public.
On a trip here in mid-February, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul sat a few feet
from the basketball court inside the Hilton Coliseum, watching Iowa
State and Texas Tech hoopsters streak up and down the court. During
breaks in the action, he turned to his left to talk with Iowa
businessman Steve Sukup, who had brought him as a guest to the game. Not
once over the course of the hour or so that Paul was in attendance (he
left after the first half for another event) did the likely presidential
candidate pull a phone out of his pocket and bury his face in it.
He was highly unusual in that respect. The arena was filled with people
who took their eyes off the court and each other — mostly during
time-outs — to whip iPhones from their pockets and sit, shoulders
hunched, scrolling alone through Facebook posts and text messages.
The smartphone is a hymnbook that commands the devotion of most of the
industrialized world. We look at these things everywhere: in line to
pick up lunch, at the playground when we should be watching our kids,
even — for some reason — in elevator rides that last less than 10
seconds. And the smartphone has atomized public gatherings. Masses of
people who once participated in events together now withdraw into their
own private universes.
Not so the presidential candidate. Ignoring other people and scrolling
endlessly on a screen in public is probably not a good idea for someone
entering the crucible of a presidential contest. The candidate must be
fully present. Or he or she will suffer the consequences.
The smartphone is a hymnbook that commands the devotion of most of the industrialized world.
“They’re the last human beings susceptible to human shame. Politicians
are the only people left for whom, occasionally, shame hurts them,” said
Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama. “Everyone
else, we’ve sort of done away with it as a concept and we’re hurtling
through space like animals, basically.
“But for politicians there’s still something to be gained by treating
people with a modicum of decency and respect, because it helps them
politically,” Lovett said.
Timmy Teepell, an adviser to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of
roughly a dozen likely candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential
nomination, agreed with Lovett’s assessment. “There’s nothing on the
phone more important than the next hand to shake or baby to kiss,”
Teepell said.
This is the first presidential election to see two technological trends
converge: Device absorption is now a cultural norm, and the field of
candidates includes several younger politicians who regularly use
hand-held phones. President Obama was a BlackBerry user in 2008 and
fought to retain one after he was elected, but smartphones were
primarily used for email back then, and the iPhone had been around only
since the summer of 2007 and had not yet acquired its cornucopia of apps
and photo-sharing power. BlackBerrys were still used mostly by elites
and the business class. Even in 2012, Republican candidate Mitt Romney
did not use a smartphone himself. He read email and articles on his
iPad, and he relied on aides to dial phone numbers for him and to brief
him on moment-by-moment news developments.
That makes 2016 the first presidential election where many of the
would-be candidates are regular smartphone users who will have to think
through how often to check their phones in public. The two current
front-runners, from both parties, are well-known device users. Former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got some of the best media coverage
of her long time in public life when a photo of her checking her
BlackBerry on a military transport plane became a viral meme that
spawned its own website, Texts From Hillary; she now faces the biggest
controversy of her time as a prospective presidential candidate over her
email use. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made his email address public
and replied to as much email as possible while in office. He even made
sure that his BlackBerry was included in his official governor’s
portrait.
2016 will be the first presidential election where candidates will have
to think through how often to check their phones in public.
It’s not as if the rules are hard-and-fast. Obama had no problem
looking at his phone on the sideline of a college basketball game in
2013. But he was well into his second term then — it’s unlikely he would
have done this during the height of a presidential campaign.
And there is always going to be the concern that under the partisan
glare of a campaign, even the most innocent moments can be misconstrued
and magnified.
“You could watch 38 minutes of a basketball game and show total
interest in the game and be enjoying the game, but if you take out your
phone for two minutes to either answer a call or check your messages,
when you’re a candidate, that’s when the shutters start clicking on the
camera,” said Kevin Madden, a senior adviser to Romney during the 2012
campaign. “That could be the depiction of your level of interest in the
game in a way that didn’t really square with reality. So you’re better
off keeping the phone off and tucked away.”
Even so, the way forward for this microscopically scrutinized group of
people is probably not one of total abstention in public. Toby Lawless, a
casting director in Los Angeles, understands the importance and impact
of a person’s image. But he said that the key for presidential
candidates will be to use their smartphones properly in public.
“[If] it’s at a Clippers game, are they using it when they should be
watching the game? Then I think, ‘Dude, watch the game.’ Are they using
it to take a selfie with Blake Griffin? I’d probably do that, so then I
identify and I think, ‘Hey, you’re sort of like me,’” Lawless said. “So
while I think a candidate using their phone in a public gathering is OK
because it makes me identify with them, I very well may judge them if I
think they’re using it with poor etiquette.
“Because while it’s probably the most useful tool we all have, it’s
also our worst addiction — and I want to see them using it well!”
And it’s here that the pressure of being watched everywhere may
actually help a candidate’s mental health. Studies have shown that
smartphone usage can cause higher levels of stress, and most people are
familiar with the sensation of feeling distracted and even somewhat
disoriented by the pace at which information comes rushing at us, and
the degree to which our egos drive us to compulsively check our social
media accounts and emails for virtual affirmation.
The candidate must be fully present. Or he or she will suffer the consequences.
In 2012, Newsweek writer Tony Dokoupil
wrote
that the Internet was making us “psychotic” and creating “a whole new
mental environment.” It is, Dokoupil wrote, “a digital state of nature
where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people
will survive unscathed.” Our brains are being rewired and suffering
atrophy from compulsive overuse of electronic devices and the Internet,
often leading to depression, he said, citing numerous scientific
studies.
He recounted the story of filmmaker Jason Russell, the creator of the
“Kony 2012” film about Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony. Russell was
found
naked and ranting
on the side of the road days after his film had gone viral on YouTube,
to the tune of 70 million views in a week. Dokoupil suggested that
Russell’s explanation — temporary insanity — was brought on by the
onrush of online feedback and attention. The New York Times last year
produced a documentary
about the lengths to which Chinese parents are going to help their
teenage children break from addiction to the Internet, sending them to
boot camps that border on prisons.
And while the average American, Dokoupil wrote, is struggling to try to
curtail phone usage, presidential candidates’ shame-enforced public
abstinence could help shield them from the technology’s ill effects.
“The good news is they get to experience events as they happen. They
get to talk to people who are actually in the room. They don’t have the
burden of trying to be instantaneously responding to all the incoming as
it happens,” said Ben LaBolt, who was Obama’s spokesman in the 2012
campaign.
LaBolt said that candidates don’t need to be “robots” in avoiding phone
usage, but that “when you’re meeting with voters, when they’re getting a
chance to look under the hood and kick the tires, you’re all theirs.
“It’s as much of what they evaluate as your policy positions,” he said.
There is one group of people, however, whom candidates can blow off if they want to, said Teepell.
“I think it’s OK to glance at your phone as a way of telling your staff
that you are no longer interested in whatever they are saying,” he
said.
