(Warning: US politics!)
Is soundbite culture still a thing that people talk about? It's the sort of term that I associate with Jon Stewart maybe a couple years back. Remember, how one of his big pet topics on the Daily Show was the 24-hour news cycle and its perpetual ravenous need for breathless, urgent, completely shallow news stories? Soundbite culture was all tied to that: how politicians were adapting to the way news media operated, and how they, knowing how what all those organizations wanted was the compact 30-second talking head to splice into their news coverage, how these politicians were tailoring their speeches and interviews to ensure that the half a minute that did make it in was exactly, EXACTLY what they wanted to say. That's what mattered, because the majority of voters (that were even paying attention) aren't ever going to see your full news scrum; they're just gonna see what the news media decides is worth showing.
But it's gone beyond just the news. It's embedded into our generation now, with likes and shares and hashtags. Our always-online culture puts emphasis on “viralness,” on shareability, on the easy-to-digest, and that's pervading into corporations, brands, entertainment, news, and yes, it's still definitely there in politics as well. There are now consulting firms, whole industries built on harnessing the power of word-of-smartphone and keyboard. Soundbite culture isn't just being driven by 24-hour news; it's now a part of social media. It's gone digital.
Which brings us to Mario Rubio.
Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barrack Obama doesn't know what's he's doing. He know's exactly what he's doing.”
Rubio said basically this line four times; three of those was within consecutive answers, in an exchange between him and Christie on if Rubio was ready to be president. Worst of all, after Christie called him out on “the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what [Rubio's] advisers gave him,” Rubio, obviously rattled and unprepared for both Christie's attack and the boos that are starting to drown out his answers, freezes up, and can't think of anything to do but to repeat that exact line again. “Here's the bottom line, this notion that Barrack Obama -” Christie interjects “There it is. There's the memorized 25-second speech!” Rubio, frustrated, almost goes into the spiel again, beginning with “this notion...” before catching himself this time.
Some people seem to think this could sink his campaign. It's definitely going to change the media narrative for Rubio heading into New Hampshire. Before, in a race of a bunch of un-serious, extreme candidates and floundering, unexciting moderates, he was the establishment candidate that seemed like the best hope for anyone that didn't want Trump or Cruz as the Republican nominee. Now, after the Rubio glitch and a relatively strong showing from Jeb! Bush, there are even articles coming out saying Bush could emerge as the establishment candidate now.
What was Rubio thinking? Certainly I think inexperience and an inability to think on his feet partly led to Rubio's gaffe, and those are probably going to be the big questions raised about him for the foreseeable future. He's not used to political speech-making and debating, and he's crammed a lot for those two areas in the last couple months, trained relentlessly to be ready for the big stages, and it shows. He always did come off as a bit over-rehearsed, a bit robotic -- press him on this topic, this preset answer emerges -- although it never seemed like quite as big of an issue before this. He's not used to give and take with the other candidates or the crowd, and he froze up, rushing to talk over the boos with whatever came to mind first. Trump responds to boos with a carefree shrug; that same debate he called out some boobirds after one of his responses as being Bush donors and special interests, and that might play well with his supporters. But Rubio, faced with the same, short circuited instead. Maybe the mounting pressure got to him. Maybe he was tired, not getting enough sleep. But, well, if any press is good press, then Rubio, who's been fighting along with anyone else running not named Trump for some spotlight, well, he's finally going to be getting a narrative the news media can sink its teeth into.
Improvisation really isn't a good skill to have to demonstrate, for a politician. Wander too far off-script, and you're only going to end up tripping yourself up; that's when you're going to say something stupid, that's when you give the news media the 30-second clip they're looking for and you're not looking to give up. Especially if you're not used to giving answers in front of large crowds, answers that are going to be dissected endlessly afterwards by media panels and columnists and radio hosts and snarky commenters on Twitter, looking for that single moment that you slip up. Trump gets away with it, but that's because he's not a politician (he just plays one on TV), and he appeals to the people that hate all politicians anyway. Rubio can't, nor can Clinton, or Cruz, or Bush, or Sanders.
Speaking about Bernie Sanders, you can see something similar in how he debates. He doesn't riff on foreign policy; he goes back to talking points. He talks about Iraq. He'll give just enough preamble related to the question so his answer doesn't seem completely ridiculous, then he'll circle back to income inequality. Part of that is the fear of going off rails, part of that is sticking with what you know, and part of that is hammering home a talking point. Maybe it makes him seem one note. But that repetition isn't going to get a ton of wider media coverage or social media attention (at least not unless he actually becomes the Democrat nominee, I don't think). It isn't going to put him on the bad side of the soundbite culture either in the news or social media. If there's a snippet of him, it's gonna be one where he's going to come off as polished and certain. Political strategists refer to it as message discipline. All the candidates do it. Politicians can't actually run on sprawling, hundred-page policy platforms. They need to boil things down to simple messages that people are going to remember: glimpses, a strong impression, a couple sticky lines that are repeated over and over, in every debate, every stump speech, every quoted line they ever hear or see from them. Bernie will fight against income inequality and Wall Street. Trump speaks his mind, and he's going to turn America from losers back into winners. Hillary's fighting for you; she's fighting for families, children, women, and she's experienced and strong. Cruz will stand up against Washington and for conservative values, and be strong against immigration and terrorism. Rubio's team knew that the question about his inexperience was going to come up. And they were ready, with a talking point, or at least they thought they were.
Rubio's team obviously thought there'd be a comparison between Rubio inexperience and Obama's: that's what'd been in the news, what Christie had been been saying on the campaign trail. Obama had also been an inexperienced senator running for presidency back in 2008, and look where that had left us! That was going to come up, and Rubio's answer would be that the issue with Obama wasn't his inexperience; it wasn't that Obama didn't know what he was doing. It was that what Obama wanted to do was wrong, and so Rubio wasn't like Obama at all. And that's a fine enough type of response to that specific question.
I think it was both over-preparation and under-preparation that did Rubio in. His team must've drilled into him, over and over, spend the first half answering the question, but make sure you hit one of your talking points and hammer it home at the end. It must've been so ingrained into Rubio, all that debate preparation, that he reflexively goes into whatever talking point best matches the topic at hand. Once it went from the structured moderator question, though, and Rubio had to respond after Christie argues that senators don't have the experience necessary to be president, Rubio counters, he attacks Christie's record, then he goes right back into the Obama talking point. And then Christie hits back with the “25-second memorized speech,” and it all falls apart.
I think you might also be able to see another debate strategy that might've been drilled into Rubio the last while: doubling down. You can see Rubio knocked off balance with how Christie shined a light directly on the way he's been structuring his debate answers; it must be like suddenly being told not to think about the way you breathe, or being told that you have a conversational tic you weren't aware of when you're in the middle of saying something. In these debates, you rarely ever see anyone back down, because that shows weakness. After Christie attacks him, Rubio fires back, and then he tries re-iterating the Obama thing, and I think in his head he actually wanted to make sure the difference between him and Obama landed. But the line doesn't work even once, and said again it just disintegrates, even if Christie hadn't pointed it out.
The worst thing about the line is that even teed up correctly, it's pretty bad. Well, no, actually, the worst thing was Rubio repeating it. But I can understand him freezing up. That talking point, though, was rehearsed, and a couple members of Rubio's team must have heard it a lot. Someone should've cleaned it up along the way. “Let's dispel once and for all with the fiction” is clunky and way too formal. It sticks in your mind for the wrong reason, because it sounds weird. “Obama knows exactly what he's doing” is actually the part of the speech that stands out the most in the whole spiel, because it's following “...fiction that Obama doesn't know what he's doing,” and the repetition makes the second line stick, which definitely isn't what Rubio's team actually wanted to emphasize. They want people to know that Obama wanted America to be more like the rest of the world, while Rubio wants to make America great again. Which is fine; it's generic but talking points can be generic, as long as the sentiment comes across. Without the awkward beginning, and with a smoother transition into it from Rubio, the talking point would'be been fine. But when you're dispelling with fictions and telling people that Obama knows exactly what he's doing, boilerplate about making America great again is just background noise. The talking point would've been pretty mediocre said once; that it was rehearsed and meant to be a capper, and that both those aspects came across all too terribly on the first run through and were amplified every time Rubio said it again, that's where it really fails.
I should say this: I didn't watch the debate. I saw clips of it, and read articles on it. I think a lot of other people also rely on articles and highlights as well; otherwise Slate wouldn't be putting up things like
The CNN Republican Debate in Under Two Minutes (which is just a video) and NY Times wouldn't have
Highlights from the Eighth GOP Debate. That's what the politicians have to think about: what 30 seconds, what highlights, are going to be clipped from their hours on the stage that night? What's going to end up being shared, what's going to end up being dissected, become emblematic in a "narrative" about you, end up in an attack ad, end up going viral? In this social media landscape, you don't want to be memorable for the wrong reasons. Being boring for most of it is fine, as long as you're looking vaguely presidential and not tripping over your answers. Hit your couple key lines, maybe land some attacks on some of the others if you're up for it, and that's a pretty solid performance. If you end up repeating bland things, it's going to be forgotten; concentrate on what you want to stick, what you want highlighted, what you want to reinforce about yourself and the other people on the stage. Marco Rubio erred the wrong way, though. He was trying to keep on-message, and I have to think that that talking point was him trying to curtail the inexperience question while hoping the rest of the debate would make up for it: a single, not a home run. Instead, he, I dunno, hit himself in the head with the bat? We'll see if he can recover.
Here's something else that's changed with the shift from soundbites to soundbytes. News, and political coverage, it used to just be about being informed. The media would report on this stuff, and you'd watch it or read it, because you felt you should: it was Important. Now, though, on social media, politics can become more of a horse race, a sport. You watch, you root, and you get invested. Just look at how ingrained poll reporting and poll watching have gotten now; it's because politics has gone social. Poll reporting has to be the best thing in the world for news media. I have to imagine it generates lots of traffic and interest for relatively little work. This, even though everyone "knows" that polls are constantly having to adjust to the the general shift away from landline phones, that they're untrustworthy, that their methods are always in a state of flux and they're reliant on historical models that could always blow up in a moment. But still, poll results are blared and shared seemingly everywhere. It's become "news." It makes sense: the people most likely to care deeply about politics are the people who should generally probably have an idea who they want to win already; now they have a way to find other people just as invested, and suddenly, people who have nothing to do with any candidate's actual campaign are nevertheless now fandoms. But still, online communities are just bubbles: Sanders might be able to look on Twitter to take the temperature of what many of his supporters are thinking, but the people that'll be actually voting at the GOP primaries? I'm not sure if Twitter's necessarily more representative of the voting public than landline phone surveys. Analog, unaccompanied, soundbites -- as in, conservative talk radio -- that might still what decides it for the Republican party.
One more thing: what about Jeb!? Jeb Bush seemed like he was dead in the water a while back, and now there's articles about how he still has a chance. The media was laughing at him for so long that people were maybe starting to feel sorry for him, because whatever you want to say about him, he's certainly stuck to his very moderate guns, while Rubio was running into trouble even before this, trying to steer hard right – from supporting amnesty -- on the immigration issue. Media – both news and social – narratives can really be so weird sometimes. Originally looking so ineffectual, Jeb as the GOP nominee might be looking like a better and better idea the further into the process we get. He still has the political infrastructure, which hasn't translated into actual support yet, but well, we'll see what happens from here.
