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By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 23, 2007

With the 2008 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries less than a year away, the professional (and the amateur) handicapper can lay aside such mundane considerations as which presidential aspirant has the best plan for Iraq or which one is most apt to produce full employment. What seems to be mattering most is a different sort of standard, the "authenticity" standard, the winner being the most appealingly "authentic" -- as in real, not fake or false -- person in the race. The quotation marks are advisable because authenticity is a deceptively difficult concept to define, especially in the political arena. Authenticity may be about manipulated perceptions of "the real McCoy" as much as it is about the actual existence of such a figure. No matter. For voters, authenticity has become a Holy Grail. "We're in the era of authenticity," political consultant Mary Matalin has proclaimed.

A rundown of the top candidates demonstrates her point. John McCain, a war hero and former prisoner of war who is known both for his "straight talk" and for a string of best-sellers that trade on that character trait, is the personification of the post-Bill Clinton breed of authenticity politician. Come this summer, the bookstores will be featuring McCain's latest effort, "Hard Call," about path-breaking decisions, in areas such as sports and business, that took guts and principle to make. Such books "are narratives about the values he has or would like to have," Mark Salter, McCain's co-author (and chief of staff) said in an interview. Salter conceded that McCain's unyielding support of the Iraq war is so unpopular that his reputation for authenticity may be his only ticket to the White House. McCain's top rival for the Republican nomination is Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Giuliani became a national hero for his calm performance under pressure on 9/11 and in the days after, and he oozes authenticity from his outer-borough (Brooklyn-born) pores. The Giuliani mantra is "Be Your Own Man," which is a chapter title from his 2002, self-laudatory tome, "Leadership." "Rudy tends to be authentically sincere," Fred Siegel, a sympathetic biographer, told me, and Americans seem to agree: The mercurial Rudy, whom Siegel's father once described as "a beloved son of a bitch," is viewed favorably by some 70 percent of Americans.

On the Democratic side, authenticity spiked with a few ounces of charisma is a formula that may work for the superstar-from-nowhere, Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois who arrived in Washington in 2005. He has an understandably meager list of accomplishments, given his short life in politics, but he is the overnight darling of the media and those members of the public in search of an "authentic, fresh voice," the kind of voice that Robert F. Kennedy brought to politics in the 1960s, veteran Newsweek writer Evan Thomas, the author of a biography on RFK, noted recently on television's Inside Washington. Obama's first book, the memoir "Dreams From My Father," is a work of soul-baring, in which the reader is invited to be an intimate observer of the author's search for his identity as the child of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya. It is a supremely authentic American tale, almost an archetype for the 21st-century version of our Tiger Woods, melting pot society.

As for the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the common criticism that she is somehow inauthentic, a plastic figure, can be countered by a different reading of the evidence. It is certainly true that she is not a born communicator, like her husband, and that she has devoted enormous care and attention to the public packaging of her persona, but this does not amount to proof of core phoniness. The protean Bill Clinton, who can BS with the best of them, might plausibly be viewed in that way. But Hillary Rodham, as she was known in the 1960s, is an authentic child of that era, as her best-selling memoir, "Living History," shows. She authentically embodies the battles that many intelligent and ambitious women of her generation fought to establish their own careers and an identity separate from their expected roles as spouse and mom. The message discipline that she exerts can be seen as a way to use the tools of modern politics to get herself -- or at least the best part of herself -- across to the public. Ronald Reagan arguably used his acting skills for the same purpose. "I don't think she is phony at all -- I think she is authentic," Matalin, a Republican, said in an interview, adding, "I like ambitious women."

Authenticity can certainly be a trap and is perhaps a distraction: For voters, there is no particular reason to believe that an "authentic" person is going to be a good president or even, for that matter, a good person. The world is full of authentic crooks, loons, and megalomaniacs. The cowboy-boot-wearing, tobacco-chewing, football-tossing George Allen, often said to be natural in his bearing, once looked like a terrific authenticity play. But that was before he spoiled his 2006 Senate re-election bid, and his 2008 presidential hopes, by using the odd and possibly racist term "macaca" to refer to a young campaign worker for his opponent, Jim Webb. Virginia voters turned on him as an authentic jerk.

And the idea, as today's speech coaches believe, that authenticity can be acquired like any other skill (although at a cost of $10,000 to $15,000 a day for a top-rank teacher) is somewhat disconcerting, challenging what we think we know about our ability to spot that three-dollar bill. "Being authentic is better than play-acting authenticity," Ruth Sherman, who works out of Greenwich, Conn., as a communications consultant for clients in business, politics, and the entertainment industry, conceded in an e-mail exchange. But she added: "The truth is that it is difficult, if not impossible, for most voters to tell the difference."

Trap or not, the authenticity craving is already exerting a powerful pull on the 2008 presidential sweepstakes. And it is not, in fact, a new trend but a fashion that waxes and wanes. The intriguing question is, why it is waxing in this electoral cycle? Some historical perspective is useful, because a search for authenticity is often a reaction to anxieties and changes in the wider culture. The pursuit of the authentic leader may be an inescapable byproduct of America's dynamism as a society and its determination to reinvent itself every few decades or so. In the political arena in particular, this search might be voters' blunt way of responding to the endemic phoniness and artifice that sometimes seem to be the very definition of what it means to be a politician. The authentic politician, whether he be a John McCain or a Barack Obama, is almost always going to be something of an anti-politician. That is true today -- and it was true a couple of centuries ago.

The Andrew Jackson Model
They called him Old Hickory, and he was a remarkable embodiment of all that a new type of American, a new kind of authentic American, could be. Andrew Jackson was a frontiersman from the Carolinas who fought the Indians and the British, and when he entered the White House as president in 1828 -- after having lost the "stolen election" of 1824 -- he let the people, clad in their muddy boots, have the run of the joint. His two terms in office were defined by his battles against the Eastern establishment, which he viewed as insular, aristocratic, and effete. His predecessor, John Quincy Adams, a representative of that establishment, called him "a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar." Jackson was America's first great populist figure, and he derived his authenticity from that image. Although his politics are conventionally viewed as progressive, his rise to power can be seen as reactionary, in the sense that voters were jettisoning a tired and perhaps unrepresentative old model for a new one. "Authentic" figures in politics are often of this stamp.

George Washington, the "father of his country," no doubt deserves a prominent entry in any account of authenticity's role in national politics. But it is an entry of a particular kind. Washington, a plantation-owning Virginian, was in effect anointed president; for this reason, he is not the man-of-the-people model of authenticity established by Andrew Jackson and pursued by political aspirants to this day. Instead, Washington mastered the art of disciplining himself to project the exact image that he wanted to show to his peers, his troops, his countrymen, and foreign leaders. He succeeded, in other words, at the very task that Hillary Clinton is trying hard to master.

Consider how Washington is written up by John McCain. "Character Is Destiny," a 2005 book by McCain and his aide Salter, contains a chapter about Washington, under the heading of "Self-Control." The authors write: "He was intent on becoming a man of unquestioned dignity and he labored always to achieve the manners, appearance, and temperament that were its physical expressions.... He taught himself to dance with exquisite skill. His clothes were fine and neat but never flamboyant. He presented, as an admirer later observed, such an aura of command that 'there is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet' " by Washington's side.

The Washington example -- the example of a man who came across as authentic in part because he diligently rehearsed the role -- is not one that mars his character, but it is the first suggestion of the complexities that can arise when the public demands authenticity. The tip-off, for those who are determined to find the real McCoy and not the scripted one, might be the character trait of irrepressibility. George Washington does not appear to have been an irrepressible type; Theodore Roosevelt, to jump ahead to the "Rough Rider" who gobbled down just about every dish that life had to offer, and then asked for second helpings, was very much that sort. TR simply couldn't help being himself and was loved for this trait even by people who had no particular appetite for his imperial big-stick politics. Yes, John McCain comes to mind. (For wordsmiths, the origins of "the real McCoy" are obscure; one of several extant theories traces the phrase to a Prohibition-era bootlegger named William S. McCoy, who was known for delivering an undiluted product.)

Reaction and Backlash
The Jackson model notwithstanding, American politics has not always been consumed by a search for authenticity. Consider the election, four times over, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt starting in 1932 amid the terrible trauma of the Great Depression. Even his admirers often viewed FDR as a rather charming charlatan who could have each of 10 people leave a meeting believing that the boss was absolutely on his side. In his tactics, Roosevelt was a master of bluff and deceit; he could tell a convincing lie. A disoriented and fearful America, at that moment of immense peril in the 1930s, might have elected an "authentic" dictator, as another country was doing in Europe, but instead chose a wily patrician with a pragmatic genius for tailoring the right solutions to the moment. In that instance, a possible authenticity trap was avoided.

In the post-World War II era, the pursuit of authenticity became especially intense in the 1960s. And what a trip it was. The fuel was supplied by the 1950s and everything associated with that Father Knows Best era, which a new generation marching to the anthems of Bob Dylan and searching for "experience" deemed counterfeit. The '60s can be mocked for vagueness, but there can be no questioning the sincerity or idealism of that decade's quest for the real and the meaningful. Hillary Rodham, of the Wellesley class of 1969, was painfully, perhaps somewhat guiltily, aware of the privilege and isolation of her upbringing in Park Ridge, a white middle-class suburb of Chicago. Her classmates harbored similar sentiments. "Most of us had come from sheltered backgrounds, and the personal and public events we encountered caused us to question the authenticity, even the reality, of our precollege lives," she wrote, decades later, in "Living History."

In Rodham's case, her questioning led to direct action. At first she was an admirer of community organizer Saul Alinsky, an authentic act-up type of the irrepressible sort, who confronted corporations with colorful, attention-getting tactics. But then she decided, against Alinsky's advice, that change could best be pursued within the system. For a time, or perhaps for just a moment, it looked as though the 1960s authenticity movement could transform the nature of politics. As Evan Thomas has noted, Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of a slain president, a youthful figure who seemed both frail and courageous and who, on the matter of Vietnam, seem determined to speak truth to power, was the person, outside the arena of radical politics, who laid claim to the authenticity mantle. But then, of course, RFK was assassinated in 1968 and the '60s gave way to the '70s, which garnered a reputation, perhaps unfairly, for plasticity in everything from polyester pants to the disco beat. Goodbye, Jimi Hendrix; hello, Bee Gees.

Richard Nixon, the ascendant political figure in the wake of RFK's murder and LBJ's political demise, was certainly not any counter-establishmentarian's brand of authentic politician. Nor was he comfortable in his own skin, as the unrehearsed "authenticity" figure generally is. This is the man, remember, who was famously photographed walking the Pacific Ocean shores of San Clemente in dark dress trousers and what appear to be wingtip shoes. Nevertheless, Dick Nixon is not easily branded a phony. Born in a tiny farmhouse, built by his hard-luck father, in Yorba Linda, Calif., Nixon as a political property was about many things. But one of them was his representation of authentic petit bourgeois concerns, the concerns that small shopkeepers, say, have about law and order. In this sense, Nixon might be seen as anticipating the rise of Rudolph W. Giuliani, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, became a Mob-busting U.S. attorney, and then, as the mayor of New York City in the 1990s, restored a social order that '60s-style permissive policies had failed to uphold. It's another example of the authenticity figure being all about reaction, all about backlash. Or to put it another way, an authenticity figure can surf to power on a wave of nostalgia.

Blame It on Bill
The roots of today's authenticity yearning can be found in the time of Bill Clinton. The objection to Clinton, in many minds, went quite a bit further than his talents at tossing the bull. There is your standard smooth-talking salesman type who (authentically) likes to shake every hand in the room, and then there is the sort of fellow who says, "I didn't inhale," when confronted with a question about a youthful partaking of the demon marijuana weed. "I didn't inhale" is irreducibly phony. If he truly didn't inhale, he played false to his pot-smoking buddies. If he did, he lied to project a false image to Ward and June Cleaver, Mr. and Mrs. America, as a fine, upstanding boy of his time. Clinton's incessant search for the dodge, whether on the question of drug use or service in Vietnam, appeared to be an indication of his lack of good character.

Enter John McCain and the "Straight Talk Express," which was the name that his campaign staff gave to the bus on which the senator held a rolling, 18-hour-a-day press conference as he drove around the country trying to persuade voters to put him in the White House in 2001. Eight years into the era of Bill Clinton, the anti-Bill Clinton epoch had already begun. And it had legs: McCain won the New Hampshire primary and fell short in South Carolina only after a dirty campaign in which his opponents turned his bio against him, suggesting that his POW experience had somehow made him unstable.

The thing about McCain was that there was simply no pose, a biographer, Robert Timberg, noted in an interview. A graduate, like McCain, of the U.S. Naval Academy and a Marine lieutenant who served in Vietnam, Timberg included a sympathetic portrait of McCain in the 1995 book "The Nightingale's Song," and he expanded on that treatment in "John McCain: An American Odyssey." The McCain whom journalists became acquainted with on the Straight Talk Express was the very same fellow whom Timberg began hanging out with, for his book, in the late 1980s when McCain was weathering the so-called Keating Five scandal connected to abuses in the savings-and-loan industry. "He was gloomy, he was grim," Timberg recalled. "You always knew you were dealing with a human being. When he was upset, he showed it."

McCain, in short, met the irrepressibility test of true authenticity. It can be argued that his authenticity revealed good or at least pertinent things about his possibilities as a president. "People who are true to their instincts," Salter, his chief of staff, told me, "are more inclined to go with those instincts, to be bolder."

McCain failed to beat George W. Bush for the Republican nomination; but in the general election, Democrat Al Gore, the candidate who was generally seen as more synthetic and less comfortable in his skin than was Bush in his, failed to claim a prize that, in a favorable economic climate, looked well within his grasp.

The 9/11 attacks both boosted and recast the public's demand for authenticity from its leaders. Matalin, the political consultant, recalls noting this trend in the 2002 midterms, the first elections held after the attacks, in her efforts to boost prospects for GOP congressional candidates. Voters were so alarmed about a lethal threat that they poorly understood, she said, they simply shut their ears to any candidate engaging in the usual platitudinous rituals of politics. In the immediate post-Clinton era, authenticity was about moral character, about not being the sort of person who would embarrass the nation with a tawdry scandal. After 9/11, authenticity was more about the sort of person with the nerves and steel to steer the ship of state at a time of grave danger. Elected in 2000 on a platform of restoring "honor and dignity" to the White House, Bush was re-elected in 2004 with a vow to stay fast and true in his pursuit of America's enemies.

These days, Bush's job-approval ratings hover in the low 30s. The source of the public's disappointment, however, is not that he is inauthentic but that he is authentically stubborn. Hindsight views of Clinton's presidency, meanwhile, have improved. Yet, even though a phony arguably governed better than a nonphony, the public, circa 2007, is ever more demanding of authenticity. It is a difficult circle to square. Perhaps the explanation is that voters, in continuing to place a premium on authenticity, rationalize by telling themselves that Bush was simply the wrong sort of authentic person. Next time they can do better.

Handicapping the Authenticity Stakes
The 2008 presidential election will not, of course, be only about authenticity. With the Katrina and Iraq debacles in the public's mind, the election will also be about the proven (or not) competence and experience of the candidates, their visions, and their policy proposals on the big issues. But the authenticity question looms sufficiently large for it to be a useful way to handicap the field as the horses prance and snort and start to paw the starting line.

Certainly McCain, with his proven credentials, has to be considered first out of the gate. "I think McCain has the monopoly on authenticity. No one has done it better," Timberg, his biographer, said. Of course, Timberg is partial to his horse, so his assertion is not the end of the discussion. McCain's own aide, Salter, considers Giuliani to be a credible bearer of the authenticity mantle. "I think he has a sort of irrepressible personality that adds to his appeal," Salter said. Moreover, the tactics that today's McCain is adopting, to court the Christian Right and to hire political consultants known for their hardball negative ads, could undermine his authenticity appeal by making him look like a typical pol, and no more the anti-pol.

Giuliani, if he can persuade enough Republican primary voters to look past his support of abortion rights, could rival McCain's claim to authenticity. As he showed in becoming a Republican mayor of a very blue New York City, a reputation for authenticity can help a candidate transcend conventional ideological barriers. Giuliani was widely viewed as sincere even by those who felt his crackdown on crime went too far, noted Siegel, author of the 2005 biography "The Prince of the City" and an adviser to the mayor in the early 1990s. "People who hated Rudy's guts felt that on crime, he wasn't posturing," Siegel explained. A dream GOP authenticity ticket might pair McCain and Giuliani. "McCain is the only person I can imagine Giuliani running as vice president for," Siegel told me.

That would rule out, then, a pairing with Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor has embarked on a long "journey to the Right," as a recent National Journal cover story described his evolution from the man who tried (without success) to win a U.S. Senate seat in the Bay State in the mid-1990s by portraying himself as "a better advocate" for gays than the incumbent, Edward Kennedy, would be, to today's fellow, the man who is a featured speaker at gatherings of homophobic anti-gay-rights activists. Romney's task -- to win over social-conservative activists and primary voters in his path to the Republican nomination -- is to demonstrate that the new Romney is the authentic Romney. It's possibly true. It is also possible, as a matter of logic, that the old Romney was the authentic one, and possible, too, that the old and the new Romneys are both phony ideological wrappings for the middling moderate within.

Obama's Two Hurdles
On the Democratic side, the purest play in the authenticity stakes would seem to be Barack Obama. "Oh, yeah, he makes it look easy," Ruth Sherman, the speech coach, said about Obama's television appearances. And yet, he faces two quite different types of authenticity obstacles. One relates to his racial identity. In the 1960s, a decade whose divisions Obama often says America needs to rise above, a subsection of the authenticity movement was the "Black Power" struggle. This movement, at least in part, was about a rejection of artificial and low-status identities that its leaders felt had been imposed upon African-Americans by the dominant white establishment. Black Power leaders, some quite militant in their politics, encouraged black Americans to look deeper for their roots in Africa and African culture. Obama, who was born in 1961, was only 7 when Tommie Smith and John Carlos memorably bowed their heads and raised their fists, clad in black gloves, while accepting their medals at the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968. Nevertheless, that movement left a powerful legacy, and Obama has been subjected, within the black community, to questions about whether his identity meets not really a skin-color test but a cultural test of blackness.

"Obama isn't black," Debra J. Dickerson, an African-American writer and the author of the 2004 book The End of Blackness, wrote recently in Salon. The reason, she explained, even as she made it clear that his candidacy would help open the door to the highest offices for all "candidates of color," is that " 'black,' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves." Under her terms, Obama belongs in the nonblack category of "an American of African immigrant extraction." Obama, who spent years as a community organizer in poor, black, crime-ridden sections of Chicago and who made a roots pilgrimage to Kenya to meet his father's extended family, is unlikely to have much patience with this parsing. After all, he has complained in his writings about always playing "by the white man's rules" and has acknowledged how a "coil of rage" grew inside of him as a result.

Despite all of that, the perception of "not black enough" seems to be out there. Conceivably, the view could help him win the votes of some white folks -- those voters who may feel trepidations about pulling the lever for a "black" presidential candidate. But in certain early Democratic primaries, such as Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina, the black vote will be very important. Particularly in South Carolina, where many whites have already fled to the Republican Party, the black vote could approach 50 percent of the Democratic electorate. Hillary Clinton, who like her husband tends to be viewed positively by the black community, looms as a formidable competitor for those votes.

Obama's second authenticity hurdle can be seen in the way he seems to be changing the presentation of himself. Dreams From My Father, published in 1995, before he was a hotshot, was not a best-seller at first, but it did seem to draw from a deep well of honesty. Part of its appeal, as a matter of authenticity, was the author's willingness to confess to the confusion he felt about his place in American life. And the book contained confessional details of a sort that a typical politician would not reveal -- for example, his admission to using "maybe a little blow when you could afford it" during his last two years as a high school student in Hawaii.

His second book, "The Audacity of Hope," published in 2006 to best-selling acclaim, has a very different feel -- a less authentic one, it might be said. The book closes with a description of his occasional nighttime runs along the National Mall, which typically end with a jog up the Lincoln Memorial's steps. "At night, the great shrine is lit but often empty. Standing between marble columns, I read the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural," he writes, adding that, as he looks out over the Reflecting Pool, he imagines the crowd that was stilled by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963. "And in that place, I think about America and those who built it," Obama writes.

There is no reason not to believe him, but it comes across as a historically updated re-enactment of the scene in the Frank Capra film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," in which the heroic Jimmy Stewart character visits the Lincoln Memorial in search of similar inspiration. The public likes to anoint its own heroes, or at least have the illusion of doing so, which is why Obama's authenticity star could lose luster if he comes to be seen as the constructor of his own Lincolnesque legend. In "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Stewart's Jefferson Smith really was a wide-eyed character, a babe in the woods of politics. Obama entered the Senate seasoned by his experience as an elected member of a body, the Illinois Legislature, known for conducting its politics, as Obama himself once wrote, "as a full-contact sport" with "the occasional blindside hit." "Mr. Smith" in Washington he is not.

Edwards's Lifestyle Disparity
John Edwards, too, could find himself impaled on the authenticity stake. Picking up where he left off as John Kerry's running mate in 2004, Edwards is positioning himself for the nomination with a sell based on his life story as the son of a millworker who understands in his bones the concerns of working-class America -- an America not of the rich and privileged. His problem on this score is that he is a wealthy former trial lawyer who appears to be living the lifestyle of a wealthy former trial lawyer. Sensing a bio-hypocrisy issue, the news media are all over his "new, palatial estate" outside of Chapel Hill, N.C. -- a 29,000-square-foot house and a separate recreation area that includes a swimming pool and a squash court.

Squash, a sport born at elite British boarding schools, is not exactly Joe Six-Pack's favorite. It's not clear whether the Edwards court is built for American-style play, with a hard green ball, or for the international-style game, which is increasingly popular in the States and is played with a soft ball. The ribbing about his plush new quarters, in any case, has begun. In an item in The Kansas City Star subheaded "The other America," the newspaper quoted comedian Jay Leno as saying, "All the presidential candidates were very busy this weekend. John Edwards traveled over 500 miles, and that was just from his front door to his swimming pool."

As for Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, she may never convince certain Republicans -- or certain males, be they Republican, independent, or Democratic -- that she is the kind of authentic person for whom they can vote. Even if she did stop using her maiden name to help her downcast husband win back his job as governor of the set-in-its-ways state of Arkansas in the 1980s, she makes no apologies for being the post-'50s sort of woman who was not satisfied to stay home and bake cookies; the work-the-levers sort of woman who became the first female partner in her Little Rock law firm; the opportunistic sort of woman who took to ensuring her family's financial security by venturing into the market for cattle futures and making a tidy bundle; and the pugnacious sort of woman who says, as she recently did, "When you're attacked, you have to deck your opponents." (Let the slugging begin?)

But perhaps it won't much hurt her that "Hillary" is authentically that sort of woman -- and a whole lot more. A dream Democratic authenticity ticket might pair Hillary Clinton, with her "modern-woman" appeal to the female portion of the electorate, and George Allen-slayer Jim Webb, with his war-hero, kick-ass, "real-man" appeal to the male segment. The freshman senator from Virginia is authentically brave, authentically outspoken, and, depending on your take on his conversational dustup with Bush on the Iraq war, authentically rude. But at least he is authentic.

John McCain, the suddenly less-than-straight-talking former POW, still holds the authenticity edge. Crime-busting, tough-SOB Rudy Giuliani calmed a country with his empathetic side on 9/11. Hillary Rodham Clinton's 1960s activism has morphed into a smart-pol centrism for the 21st century. Everyone loves Barack Obama's story, but blacks say he isn't black enough, and his Lincolnesque legend may be too self-created. John Edwards is genuinely the son of the working class, but what about that lawyerly lifestyle of the rich and famous?

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