Now, that is ignorant.
Voting for a President, because he is cute??! Hillary is in trouble!
Howard Scores
Kerry was cute, but Dean is Q'ter.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, November 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
John Kerry's campaign cratered this week. After months of competing in the Democrats' version of "Elimidate," it looks like the party's Joe Millionaire turns out to be not the handsome Mr. Kerry but locked and loaded Howard Dean.
For weeks, I've been entertaining conversation partners by telling them that John Kerry couldn't win, not because he had the wrong campaign manager but because he has a hopelessly low Q Score. Most people don't know what a Q Score is, though it's been around marketing for decades and is arguably the secret of the universe, or the universe inhabited by most Americans--meaning whatever they see on television.
I discovered the Q Score years back when writing a story on TV news consultants. News consultants are the reason that virtually every local TV news program looks alike. What works in Poughkeepsie will work in L.A. If the way you present news, weather and sports is essentially a commodity, what matters most is the vessel that delivers the corn--the anchor folk.
The Q Score is brutally uncomplicated: It puts an array of anchormen or anchorwomen in front of test audiences and asks for just one of two responses: I like or I don't like. If the candidate's got Q and can read large type, he gets the job. All of you can surely name a local TV personality who's been in town for years, just reading the news or weather. Everyone "likes" them. They have a high Q Score. The actress Doris Roberts ("Everybody Loves Raymond") keeps appearing in sitcoms because she has high Q.
Over the years, Marketing Evaluations Inc., the proprietor of this powerful, plain-vanilla metric (a Q of 19 is the likability minimum), has reported consistently high Q Scores for Tom Hanks (56), Bill Cosby (the highest ever recorded at 71), Julia Roberts, Sean Connery and Lucille Ball (they also measure the dead). Woody Allen and Martha Stewart have low Q. Cal Ripken and George Foreman have high Q. Connie Chung had high Q with CBS, but low Q with CNN. Like, don't like, on a sliding scale. Life is simple, assuming that "life" is what's on a movie or TV screen. That of course includes politics.
But the Q company's president, Steven Levitt, says they don't do politics. Why not? I asked, it seems like a natural market for doing Qs. "Getting paid by these political groups is impossible, especially the losers," he says, which pretty much ends the conversation. But in any event, he says, "We won't do politics, religious figures, royalty or porn stars." Also he says that Q asks people to rate personalities as their "favorite," which leaves out politicians because "they fall below the radar screen on likability."
Well, it's dirty work, but someone has to do it. The nine Democratic presidential candidates offer a perfect opportunity to do a Political Q. They array themselves regularly for national viewing. They're all trying to capture the votes of the party's left-wing/union primary constituency, so they express more or less the same views on everything. With the politics commoditized, like the evening news, what basis remains for picking a candidate? The Q Score. I like, I don't like. Real simple.
Before assigning scores, let us quickly footnote that in Marketing Evaluation's experience performers with high Q do in fact share one trait: They don't seem fake.
Thus, of all the marquee candidates, Dick Gephardt, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman and Wes Clark would have low Q, below the 19 minimum. Rating candidates for the U.S. presidency in this way is of course ridiculous, but they bring it on themselves. Television, amid the vapors of its two dimensions, somehow exposes artifice, and when these men speak, you can hear the gears shifting to match the audience.
John Kerry's Q is even lower, in a way that may be quite unfair and even frivolous; he's the best-looking candidate on the stage, yet somehow the least Q'able. I can think of one other American political figure who physically resembles John Kerry--Abe Lincoln. Gaunt, long, hang-dog and at war with internal demons. You don't need me to explain the crucial difference in the way the Kerry and Lincoln personas touch the public heart.
In a commoditized candidate slate, Howard Dean is winning the Q race and the nomination because, on television, he seems more real than the rest; the Dean words and belief system sound in sync. Against this field, it adds up to victory. (Al Sharpton's Q isn't bad; worth a shot at a sitcom.)
If any of this is true, then people in politics, especially the Bush-haters, need to come to grips with George W. Bush's long months of high personal ratings. My guess is that Mr. Bush's Q Score would be OK, but not great. In person he's ebullient, but the guy on TV makes some people anxious, including supporters. So what's he got?
Supporters would say he's right on the issues, but I don't think that's enough. George Bush has street cred. He not only says it, he actually believes it. This certitude as much as anything accounts for the hatred, but for less ideologically invested voters the ability to discern true commitment matters a lot. (Bill Clinton's appeal to those most devoted is that he was the first hipster president--ironic to the core, which is to say, never without an exit strategy.)
This long pander campaign by the Democratic candidates, an unprecedented exercise in sail-trimming, has been pretty much a disaster for them. By now the whole party's Q Score is probably low. Conventional wisdom holds that after Howard Dean secures the nomination, he'll tack back to center, away from the primaries' left. Smart politics. But it may be wrong on Q.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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