Ep 116 Should Politicians Cry on TV Interviews April 25, 2016

Can a politician cry on television during an interview or during a speech and get away with it?

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This question was emailed to me by a regular viewer and listener and forgive me, but I accidentally deleted your name. I apologize, but you know who you are. Dear T.J. i have one question. Can a politician or public speaker cry on a TV interview or when they are talking about sad news? Sometimes they try to show us sadness. This is positive or a negative point for them. Thanks for your time. Have a wonderful day. Well, thanks for sending me the question. This used to be pretty clear cut. It used to be considered. If you were a man and you cried, that was seen as real weakness and it was sometimes perceived as the kiss of death. Most famously for those of you who follow politics closely in the United States, Senator Ed Muskie, who was the frontrunner, one of the frontrunners in the 1972 Democratic hunt for the presidency, the Democratic nomination, was in New Hampshire and was answering charges attacks on his wife and was seeing what most people perceived as crying. Now he said that those were snowflakes on his face melting and he wasn't crying. I'm not quite sure who to believe, but it was certainly widely written about at the time and characterized as him crying when attacked. It was perceived as weakness and his fight for the nomination went down. It never really recovered from that. Now you can make the case there were a lot of other factors in that campaign as to why George McGovern, the eventual Democratic nominee, succeeded. But for many, many years that was the template. Oh, you can't cry. You'll be like Ed Muskie, who later went on to be a Secretary of state and had been a successful governor and still had a successful career. Now that is not the case. There are numerous examples of politicians, male or female, who cried. Hillary Clinton famously had what looked like a hint of a tear in 2008 and started doing much better in the campaign for a while. Barack Obama has occasionally had a slight moistening of the tear. Now is it possible to overdo it? Former speaker of the House John Boehner was someone who people widely mocked him for crying so frequently it was like a waterworks and he was laughed at. But he got to be speaker of the House for by the standards of that office a long time. It was not the tears that did him in. It was the politics and the infighting between conservatives and those even further on the right that eventually ended his speakership. So to me he is an example of someone who the tears didn't help his image at some point, but it certainly didn't destroy his career. I want to broaden this discussion in a moment to the real role of emotion for a politician or a speaker when communicating.

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Crying is obviously an expression of emotion. It's a pretty intense emotion. It's one of the most intense emotions you could possibly have. So if you're a politician or a speaker or someone in the public eye, I do think you have to use it sparingly and people are going to judge. It's much more memorable than just talking head, spouting facts in a straightforward, bland, boring way. So if you do cry on tv, people are going to notice. They're going to make judgments. It's about the context. Are you crying for good reason? It's one thing if you cry because you were told you received three fewer votes than you expected and you're being petulant. It's quite another if you cry because someone just told you your child has been in a serious life threatening accident. In fact, if you don't cry in that situation, that could cut against you because you could be seen as heartless and almost mechanical. The biggest issue, and I hate to use this buzzword because I do think it's often overused, is authenticity. Are you expressing emotion in a way that, that seems authentic to your audience? Now, this is subjective. There are a lot of people who, for example, see Donald Trump railing with emotion against immigrants and illegal immigrants and they think this is absurd. He's obviously patently insincere, inauthentic because he hires all sorts of illegal immigrants to work at his hotel properties in Florida and elsewhere and he seems to marry immigrants on a regular basis. So this guy obviously is being inauthentic and fake and phony. Other people see him and think this guy is fantastic, he's speaking for me. So there's certainly a degree of subjectivity there. And you may figure out a way of speaking with emotion that the audience you care about, or at least some audience, views you as highly authentic. And other people think you're just a complete pathetic, wretched phony baloney. And that's just life. You're not necessarily going to come across 100% everyone. I do believe for most public speakers, politicians, public figures, you're on pretty safe ground. If you occasionally show emotion and it seems completely authentic to who you are and what you're about. And you're showing emotion because you're concerned, not just about your own personal feelings, but how you feel other people are affected. Ronald Reagan rose to power in the United States not just because of his successful movie star career, but because of his speech at the 1964 Republican convention. I always forget if it's his nominating speech for Goldwater or the keynote speech, but a prominent speech at the 1964 convention where he did speak passionately with emotion about his fears of the rise of communism, the loss of liberty, the weakening of defense, and the problems of increased taxation. And it struck a lot of people as authentic, as believable. It did not seem as though he were just following the script of an actor. It seemed as though he genuinely believed it. And I think he did believe it, so therefore it worked for him. Now, I'm not being partisan. Today. On the other side of the spectrum, when people see or saw Bill Clinton saying, I feel your pain, people got the sense that he genuinely, genuinely did care and does care about people who are less fortunate than he is. Again, we're not here to talk about politics. Some of you don't like Reagan, some of you don't like Clinton's politics. That's not what this show is about. I'm saying both of them were able to talk about policies, they cared about the issues, they cared about their intellectual positions, and to do it in a way where they packaged it with their emotions, where it just didn't come on too strong. I don't really remember seeing either one of them crying or blubbering in a loud way, but occasional, a little tear at an appropriate moment worked for them. Now, there is the cliche of the generic motivational speaker who gives exactly the same speech and tears up at exactly the same moment when talking about some horrible thing that happened in his childhood. And indeed, that can seem a bit phony and cliched, and it kind of rubs me the wrong way. Again, this is one of these situations where the context can vary and the reaction from the audience can vary. I have been to Toastmasters conventions where I've heard speakers get up and cry about some horrible thing that happened in their childhood. And maybe I'm just a crass, mean person, but my reaction was this. I'm putting together the world's littlest violin. To me, it seemed fake and phony. And how you can say that hundreds of times just to me seems inauthentic. And guess what? Everyone else in the room loved it. They loved that emotional moment. And so it worked for them. So I'm not necessarily knocking it. You need to know your audience. You need to know how it will play with them. And you need to test it. The biggest problem most politicians make, most public speakers make, most business executives make is not that they're overly emotional and they cry too much. The biggest problem most speakers, politicians, executives make executives make is they strip all the emotion of their presentations. Not only do they not cry, but they don't laugh, they don't smile, they don't have fun with their presentation because they think of a presentation as just a way to push all the facts out. And that generally is the worst way, because it becomes bland, it becomes boring, it becomes undifferentiated. And that's a far bigger problem for anyone who's trying to communicate. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. I hope all of your presentations in life are successful and that the results of your speech are not that you cry or that your audience cries, but that everyone is happy with the messages you shared. Until next time. See you then.

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