Politicians are the only people who can't be addicted to their phones
On the trail and off the phone
(Illustration: John Holcroft for Yahoo News)
AMES, Iowa — 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.
