Two heads aren’t better than one for Democrats
If we learned anything on Tuesday night, it is this: under no circumstance should Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi ever appear on television together.
Not in prime time. Not in the breakfast hour. Not at 3 in the morning. Not ever.
Anyway, it was precisely 9:14 p.m. when the networks cut to Capitol Hill.
There, squished together like commuters on a rush hour bus, Schumer and Pelosi stood behind one podium. It was weird. The first rule of public speaking and event planning is simple. Unless the dais contains law enforcement from multiple agencies or conjoined twins, you put one human head behind one wooden podium at one time.
Putting two human heads behind one podium is three kinds of crazy.
So even before the Democratic leaders opened their indignant mouths to contradict Donald Trump’s first Oval Office address on his ongoing demand for a border wall, the bad ISIS lighting and claustrophobic staging made Schumer and Pelosi look like they were waiting to get heirlooms appraised on Antiques Roadshow.
I don’t get it. Following an Oval Office address, it’s unusual for the other party to get equal prime time. There were no counterpoints after John F. Kennedy explained his desegregation orders in the south. There was no addendum to George W. Bush’s address following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But after getting this free gift from the networks, what? The Democrats decide it’s best to deliver their rebuttal from a cramped corridor with the same triangular perspective and rough specs as the hallway from The Shining? Why didn’t Schumer and Pelosi just squeeze
into a Fiat 500 and poke their heads out the sunroof? Why not lecture viewers while spooning inside one sleeping bag?
And given the captive audience they were lucky to get, you’d think the Democrats would have devoted a few minutes of prep time to another cardinal rule of public speaking: projecting warmth.
My God, there are robots inside Boston Dynamics that seem more lifelike.
You want your audience to feel engaged. You want your audience to hang on every word and not be sidetracked by visual ephemera or the disturbing thought you may, in fact, be undead. You want your audience focused on your message.
What you don’t want is for the audience to have a mass panic attack because it seems entirely possible you’re about to reach through the screen to steal their souls.
Who provided the facial coaching to Schumer and Pelosi? Sean Penn? Val Kilmer? Count Dracula? Schumer looked like he was furiously trying to hypnotize a pastrami sandwich. It’s like a voice inside his head was saying, “Scowl. Glower. DON’T BLINK. Now pretend you just caught the cameraman having sex with your wife.”
And what is up with Pelosi’s resting face? Why do her eyebrows look like they are performing cartwheels on a tight- rope? Why does she look like she was Tasered a half-dozen times at close range, but at a voltage insufficient to drop her?
I know what you’re thinking: Hey, jackass, who cares how they looked? It’s what they said that counts.
Agreed. So can you remember what they said? The specifics? No, you can’t.
And you can’t because the shoebox setting and bank hostage video overshadowed their message. It’s hard to pay attention to the words coming out of mouths when everything else in the frame is a distraction.
And that’s why this performance quickly degenerated into a farce and why viewers were too busy cracking wise to think about immigration or any humanitarian crisis.
When a serious rebuttal triggers thousands of jokes, someone screwed up.
If you watched this surreal double-bill of political theatre on Tuesday night, what’s clear is the Democrats will need to up their TV game in the weeks and months ahead.
On their own, Pelosi or Schumer might have been fine. But together they created a creepy sideshow, a one-two punch of jarring and unintentional hilarity.
Whatever you think of Mr. Trump, the guy is a Jedi knight when it comes to understanding television, a medium that is both elastic and unforgiving.
Yes, Trump seemed oddly desperate on Tuesday — if his shutdown lasts another two weeks he may well agree to secure the border with miles of shower curtains — but unlike Schumer and Pelosi, he didn’t seem out of his element.
As their rebuttal started, pre-empting programming across the dial, the all-caps CNN chyron read: “DEMOCRATIC LEADERS RESPOND TO TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION ADDRESS.”
That’s all they had to do. Respond. Refute. Knock down Trump’s disinformation. Snuff out his fear and loathing with stats and perspective. Be persuasive and authoritative. Connect. Convince. Get in and get out.
Instead, they became a meme.