Press, passion, and Portsmouth: narratives about "crying" on the campaign trail.

• Author: Falk, Erika
• Position: Report

PRESS, PASSION, AND PORTSMOUTH: NARRATIVES ABOUT "CRYING" ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

On January 7, 2008, one day before the New Hampshire primary, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, an undecided voter asked presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton, "How do you do it? ... How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?" (Kornblut, 2008, p. A09). In answering the question, Clinton's voice quivered and tears appeared in her eyes. The next day, despite polling showing Obama in the lead in New Hampshire, Clinton won a plurality of votes. The incident at Portsmouth subsequently generated vast amounts of press coverage. A search of Lexis-Nexis revealed that in the week that followed the incident there were more than five hundred articles in English language papers reporting the story, and that eighty-five of those stories headlined with the tears. The press framed the incident as a major moment in the campaign and treated it as a profoundly important story about Senator Clinton.

Little academic research has focused on the expression of emotion by candidates. When scholars have tackled emotion in the political communication literature it has been more often in the context of how voters' emotions impact their voting choices (e.g., Ragsdale, 1991). In 1998 Glaser and Salovey declared, "Research has centered ... on the emotions of voters with regard to candidates, largely to the exclusion of studies of the impact of candidates' emotionality" (1998, p. 156). This claim seems as true today as it was a decade ago.

This paper will argue that we can understand the amount and type of press coverage of Clinton's Portsmouth moment by viewing the press stories as a narrative about her as a character in an unfolding campaign story. Specifically, Clinton got so much coverage because it represented a good story, and it was a good story because (a) it was perceived to have important consequences (arguably determining the outcome of the New Hampshire primary), (b) it resonated with stereotypes about women (women are emotional), and (c) it gave insight into the character of Hillary Clinton, a presidential candidate.

Walter Fisher (1989) in his seminal book Human Communication as Narration argued that humans are fundamentally storytellers, and they understand life as a series of stories. People also make arguments by telling stories. These stories are considered convincing if they meet the tests of narrative probability (the story must hang together and seem coherent) and narrative fidelity (the story must ring true with other stories that people have heard before and have come to believe). The characters in a story's narrative also play a prominent role in Fisher's theory. He argued that believable stories rely on the consistent actions of characters. Readers are less likely to believe and trust stories with unreliable characters. Fisher argued that we can enhance our understanding of human communication by exploring texts as narratives.

Similarly, Jamieson and Waldman (2003) argued that people understand press stories as narratives. They noted, "By arranging information into structures with antagonists, central conflicts, and narrative progression, journalists deliver the world to citizens in a comprehensible form" (p. 1). Moreover, they argued that reporters are so invested in telling a good story they often leave out facts when it would undermine the story line. To better examine the narrative elements in the story about Clinton at Portsmouth, I conducted a rhetorical analysis of press coverage of the event.

METHOD

This study examined the press coverage of Clinton's campaign event in Portsmouth that appeared in the "Major U.S. and World Publications" database found in Lexis-Nexis in the week after she shed tears at Portsmouth. To select the articles, I searched for Clinton's last name and a series of words connoting sadness. The search terms in the Clinton race included: (Clinton and emotion) or (Clinton and cry) or (Clinton and tear) or (Clinton and weep). I generated these terms by scanning coverage of the news for typical terms used to describe the incident.

In an attempt to understand how the emerging press narratives about Clinton compared to other narratives, I also examined press accounts of three other candidates known to have cried on the presidential campaign trail. In covering candidate emotion, the press has most frequently cited the cases Senator Edmund Muskie in 1972 and Representative Pat Schroeder in 1987. I also examined press coverage of Governor Mitt Romney's tears in 2008. Although a much less well-known incident, this example provided a good opportunity for contrast since, unlike Muskie and Schroeder who actually cried outright on the campaign trial, Romney, like Clinton, only had his eyes fill with tears and a catch in his voice. The Romney and Clinton incidents also happened within a month of each other so they occurred not only during the same campaign but also within the same historical-cultural milieu.

I collected the Schroeder and Romney data from the same Lexis-Nexis data set with the same search terms and date parameters used to identify the Clinton stories. Lexis-Nexis does not contain coverage of the 1972 race. I assembled the Muskie data by searching the electronic databases of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal for the search term "Muskie" for one week after he cried in Manchester and one week after the New Hampshire primary and then downloading only those stories with "Muskie" in the headline. I used these papers because they allow electronic searches for articles published in 1972.

Once I collected the texts I closely analyzed them to permit me to identify issues, themes, and narrative patterns across the stories. This analysis surfaced both commonalities and differences in the cases and in the elements of the emerging narratives. This analysis also enabled me to determine what stories our culture tells about candidates who cry and to see how the Clinton narratives compared to other existing stories of candidates who shed tears. I also investigated the texts to see how the press linked Clinton's display of her emotions to revelations about her character. Finally, I analyzed the texts to reveal what these narratives suggest about our cultural assumptions about leadership, women, and emotion.

FOUR STORIES OF TEARS ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

Emotion and Control

The Clinton incident occurred at a routine campaign stop with undecided voters in New Hampshire the day before the primary. Clinton had been the front-runner with a wide lead in the polls since early 2007, but by late in the year Barack Obama had been gaining steadily (Democratic Presidential Nomination, 2008). Obama won decisively in the Iowa caucuses on January 3rd just four days before Portsmouth.

The descriptions of Clinton's appearance at Portsmouth are consistent in that they portrayed her as expressing sadness but in a very controlled way. For example, Clinton "choked back tears" (Mcauliff, Saul, & Connelly, 2008, p. 7) and "teared up" (Bellantoni, 2008, p. A1). Many of the articles were explicit about noting that although there were tears in her eyes, she did not cry. "Clinton did not cry or look like she was crying, but she was on the verge of it" (Healy, Santora, & Knowlton, 2008, p. 1); "Mrs. Clinton's eyes welled up with tears, but she did not cry at the New Hampshire event on Monday" (Healey, 2008, p. A1); and "Hillary Clinton didn't break down and weep" (Doyle, 2008, p. K3). In one case, the author explicitly distinguished between Clinton and other politicians who showed more passionate displays of emotion. "Clinton's display of emotion fell well short of then-Sen. Edmund S. Muskie's teary withdrawal from the 1972 Democratic contest or Rep. Pat Schroeder's emotional departure from the 1988 Democratic race" (Kornblut, 2008, p. A9).

Less than one month earlier, Mitt Romney, a candidate for the Republican nomination, had a very similar incident. He had teared up while talking on Meet the Press about the history of blacks in the Mormon Church. Video clips of both Romney's tears and Clinton's tears are available on the internet and although they are substantially similar, there is a subtle difference between them. The emotion in Clinton's voice is slightly more prominent and the emotion in her voice lasts longer. It is also important to note that a few days after the incident on Meet the Press, Romney teared up again while imagining his son had died in Iraq, and the press often reported these two incidents together. The Romney event is a good source for comparison because it was so similar to and proximate in time with the Clinton event, albeit carried out by people of different genders.

The press described both incidents similarly. Accounts of both focused on the candidates having tears in their eyes but remaining in control, as is clear from these examples: "Mr. Romney ... held back tears" (Reid, 2007, p. 35), and "his eyes filled with tears" (Levenson, 2007, p. A17). In both of these cases there was emotion, but it was clearly a controlled depiction of emotion. It is interesting to note the Romney incident generated much less coverage, just fourteen articles and two headlines in the same database that generated more than five hundred articles and eighty-five headlines in regard to Clinton. The argument in both the Clinton and Romney coverage was that the candidates were experiencing emotion, but they were in control. This depiction of controlled sadness stands in contrast to the classic cases of Schroeder and Muskie.

The only other well-known example of a woman presidential candidate shedding tears on the campaign trail occurred on September 28, 1987, as Representative Pat Schroeder addressed some hometown supporters at an event in Denver, Colorado. Schroeder was a not a leading candidate in the polls and had only run a short four-month "testing-the-waters" campaign. She told the...