Play it again, Hillary: a dramaturgical examination of a repeat health care plan performance.

• Author: Thomas, W. John

[T]he tone of the new [performance] ... is different from that of the first. It had to be, since we know what's coming. (1)

Over a decade ago, this journal published two of my attempts to explain Bill Clinton's presidency and, especially, the 1993 Health Care Reform Plan (Plan 1) (2) that both Bill and Hillary Clinton made a central tenet of Bill's first term in office. (3) In the first piece, using the dramaturgical metaphor that sociologist Erving Goffman first articulated in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (4) I argued that in order to maximize the effect of their public presentation of Plan 1, the Clintons sought to maintain a clear separation of their "behind the curtain" activities from those that took place "in front of the curtain." I concluded that the presentation and the Plan failed because the presentation's participants failed to maintain that separation: "Portions of the public audience simply rejected the Clintons' performance [when] they found it false, or at least dissonant with the performers' identities. For whatever reason, the Clintons have not been able to maintain the separation of character and performer that Ronald Reagan, for example, managed so effortlessly." (5)

Then, in the 1996 Presidential election, "Despite Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Paula Jones and campaign-finance shenanigans with a shady cast large enough to populate a new Coppola epic, [Clinton] took the oath of office not in manacles but with an approval rating rivaling Ronald Reagan's." (6) In short, the "character issue," or what I, in Goffmanian fashion, termed "performer focus" (7) did not doom the campaign as I claim it doomed the presentation of Plan I three years earlier. Indeed, the conflation of performer and character appeared to have little impact on voting.

My second article was my attempt to reconcile the election result with my commentary about the presentation of Plan I. (8) The article compared particular elements of the presentations of Plan I and the campaign--their casts and scripts--and concluded that the performances themselves were not sufficiently different to explain the dissimilar results. The political contexts of the performances, however, were sufficiently different to produce different outcomes. Most notably, the Clintons presented Plan I during the rise of the Contract with America, Newt Gingrich's package of legislation designed to reduce drastically the role of government in America. (9) By contrast, the campaign took place after the spectacular failure of the Contract. Characters, performers, and performances associated with government became much more appealing after Congress and the public rejected the Contract's antigovernment thesis. (10)

I retained the Goffmanian dramaturgical metaphor, but attempted to fine tune it by drawing from the work of a drama writer of a very different stripe, film critic Pauline Kael. (11) Goffman did not consider the ramifications of the context of a performance. Kael, however, urged that we can only properly evaluate performances when we view them against a backdrop of the "implied system of values" supplied by the context. (12) I concluded my second article by urging that Goffman's metaphor illuminates political activity best when considered in its context. (13)

Well, to paraphrase a President who was able to stay in character regardless of context, "here we go again." (14) On September 17, 2007, now Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton unveiled a central plank in her campaign platform: The American Health Choices Plan (Plan It). (15) It's a sequel! (16) Or is it a remake? (17) Regardless of which it is, (18) Plan II represents a variation of the dramaturgical metaphor that Goffman did not contemplate: a revived script, performed in a new context, with the original leading actress but an otherwise all-new cast. But, this is well-trod territory for film critics, and, as "the most influential film critic of her time," Kael has led the way. (19) In characteristic biting tone, Kael has assessed first and second works independently and, then, judged the second in light of the first. At times, she found the original sufficiently lacking that she refused to analyze the second work. (20)

This third, and final, one act episode in my SLPR/Clinton trilogy summons the ghosts of Goffman and Kael once again and attempts to make dramaturgical sense of Plan II and its presentation. (21) Scene One presents a brief reprisal of the works of Goffman and Kael and articulates how these disparate bodies of work fit together to aid in understanding political performance. Scene Two describes Plan II. Scene Three brings together the context, the lead actress/director's performance, and the expectations of the remake's audience to assess Plan II's presentation. Finally, the Epilogue offers a few concluding words about the utility of the Goffman / Kael analytical framework.

SCENE ONE: GOFFMAN AND KAEL BRIEFLY REPRISED

A. Erring Goffman

Erring Goffman gave "a mordant irony to the pretensions and theatricality of everyday interaction." (22) In 1959's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman articulated the centerpiece of that ironic exposition, the dramaturgical metaphor:

The dramaturgical perspective ... can be used as the endpoint of analysis, as a final way of ordering facts. This would lead us to describe the techniques of impression management employed in a given establishment the principal problems of impression management in the establishment of identity and interrelationships of the various performance teams which operate in the establishment. (23) All performances, whether in the theater, life, or the political arena, employ a "front" to "define the situation for those who observe the performance." (24) By maintaining a separation between that front and what stays behind the curtain, "a performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself and his products." (25) Thus, a performer may manage an "impression of infallibility" by concealing her errors, or she may wish to reveal only the end product of her efforts to conceal either that she devoted little effort to the project or, conversely, to cloak "long, tedious hours of lonely labor." (26) She may also seek to conceal unclean, illegal, or cruel "dirty work" or the circumvention of formal procedures. (27)

Goffman's "everyday" examples of performance include the roles of waiters, tailors, grocers, and auctioneers. To function effectively, the performer must not only play the appropriate role, but must also convince the audience that she is content to do so and does not aspire to any other station. (28) She must also stay in character. (29) This, indeed, is the "paradox" of acting: the actor must be herself, while conveying to her audience someone else. (30) "Actor means 'I the character,' not 'I myself.'" (31) If the actor does not convey the character, she fails to perform the underlying work, conveying to the audience only her own identity.

B. Pauline Kael

[Pauline Kael was] the most quotable critic writing; but what is important and bracing is that she relate[d] movies to other experience, to ideas and attitudes, to ambition, books, money, other movies, to politics and the evolving culture, to moods of the audience, to our sense of ourselves--to what movies do to us, the acute and self-scrutinizing awareness of which is always at the core of her judgment. (32) Kael argued that context can shape a performance and affect audience reaction to it. World events and cultural norms give both performers and their audiences shared points of reference. For example, she urged, "There is no way to estimate the full effect of Vietnam and Watergate on popular culture, but earlier films were predicated on an implied system of values which is gone now...." (33) The loss of that implied system of values--the context in which we viewed pre-Vietnam film--informs the meaning of post-Vietnam films.

Political analysts have long urged that one can assess the substance of political action only by considering its context. We can, for example, better understand Presidents' challenges to judicial review by viewing those actions within their "particular political context[s]." (34) And, the post-9/11 political context informs our understanding of President George W. Bush's nearly ubiquitous use of presidential "signing statements" to explain or, some might say, compromise the legislation that he has signed into law. (35)

Allusion to Kael's work enriches the analytical calculus by directing us to consider the political actor's performance qua performance in its context. In 1952, for example, when running for the Vice Presidency, Richard Nixon spoke to the country to address challenges to his "honesty and integrity." (36) In the most famous lines of the speech--those which gave the speech its nickname--Nixon referred to a "little cocker spaniel ..., black and white, spotted [which his] little girl Tricia, the 6-year old, named ... Checkers." (37) The words spoke for themselves, but Kael would undoubtedly have urged us to notice Nixon's wife, Pat, who stoically sat next to him while he spoke of her "respectable Republican cloth coat" that he had purchased with donors' contributions. (38)

Context is similarly consequential to other political performances. Consider, for example, Jimmy Carter wearing a sweater and sitting by a fireplace while urging the public to turn down the thermostat to conserve energy. (39) Or, consider George W. Bush declaring in May 2003 that "[m]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended" while standing on an aircraft carrier under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished." (40)

C. The Goffman / Kael Analytical Framework

To ascertain the potential benefit of the Goffman/Kael framework, consider a campaign stop of any of today's presidential hopefuls. At the appointed moment, the candidate takes the...