Should you smile for your mug shot?
Part of winning is refusing to yield to your opponent. Exhibit One: Tom DeLay's mug shot.
Let a smile be your umbrella
One of our pet theories of communications is fulfillment of petterns. The human mind looks for patterns, and when an expected pattern is incomplete, people tend to become unsettled.
Take this story today, about a big Powerball (lottery) winner. You know how these stories go: A poor slob who picked her kid's birthday wins big, and it changes her life. We the reader are upset that it wasn't us, but darn it, she's just like us. Maybe even worse off. So she deserves it.
Except this time, it was a wealthy US Senator who won the big prize. This violation of pattern becomes news in itself, and the story becomes, not 'hail to the lucky winner', but 'life is unfair':
"In a just and equitable society, Sen. Judd Gregg would be the last person who should win the lottery... "Mug shots likewise are expected to follow a pattern: You're supposed to look guilty. It helps a lot if you're dirty and disheveled (unshaven is a plus). You certainly shouldn't be smiling, because the idea that only the 'right' suspects are arrested is important to us as a society. That's a pattern we don't want broken.
Even well-known celebrities generally cave in under the pressure of the moment to conform to stereotype. 'Guilty' or not, they'll fall in line and look guilty for us.
That's what makes Tom DeLay's arrest photo so unsettling to those who want to see the 'mug shot pattern' completed. His smile and calm demeanor is so unusual that it's newsworthy in itself. Simply by refusing to look guilty in his arrest photo, he comes across as a man who's not done fighting.A smile might not keep you dry. But it's underrated for deflecting a deluge of bad PR. DeLay has convinced us that many pundits have written him off way too soon.
{UPDATE: As this is being written, DeLay not only is not laying down in the face of prosecutor Earle's charges, he's striking back. DeLay is demanding that the trial judge, Robert Perkins, recuse himself. The recusal motion cites the judge's support for many Democratic candidates and causes, itemizing no fewer than 34 such contributions, totaling $5,485, since 2000. (Perkins apparently has never contributed to a Republican.) Most significant are the judge's contributions to the Democratic National Committee and MoveOn.org. Perkins contributed to MoveOn.org at the very time that that group was, in its fundraising solicitations, raising money to attack DeLay. The relevant Texas rule is that a judge must recuse himself in any matter where his "impartiality might reasonably be questioned." DeLay's lawyers have also filed a 24-page brief in support of their motion to dismiss Earle's second indictment. (It appears to be a foregone conclusion that the first indictment, alleging conspiracy, will be dismissed.) The brief sets out multiple grounds for dismissing the second indictment, several of which appear, on their face, to be persuasive.
Perkins did recuse himself under very similar circumstances, when Earle brought a laughable prosecution against Kay Hutchison just after she was elected to the Senate. In that case, Earle suffered the ultimate humiliation for a prosecutor: he got as far as the courthouse steps, and then had to tell the judge that he was unable to go forward, and the case was dismissed.}
Categories: Politics, Public+relations
Labels: big+ideas, human+nature
posted by Mister Snitch! at 3:15 PM
6 Comments:
And when Messrs. Cheney and Rove are brought in for their respective mug shots, they would do well to follow Mr. DeLay's example and smile, too.
I don't know if I'd ever advise Chaney to smile, it still comes off as sinister. He's one of those guys, like Scrooge, where the only thing you can do in terms of PR is play up his toughness to an audience that appreciates that quality. In any event, all these webs of intrigue are so convoluted, and conviction such a stretch, I'd be restrained in celebrating any judgements just yet.
Not that this seems to be stopping the far-left sites, who are just drooling in premature celebratory glee over the Death of the Republican Party and just about anything else they can imagine. I can see where one can be hungry to celebrate after a long drought, but I always remember the advice of great football coaches who tell their players scoring the big touchdown or winning the big games to act like they've been there before. I've seen more than one blooper reel where a player starts celebrating before he gets into the end zone - and drops the ball.
Winners show discipline. I see DeLay smiling, a very disciplined act under the circumstances. I also see a lot of Dem officials and sympathizers acting in a very undisciplined manner. They're demonstrating that it's been so long since they caught a break, they don't know what to do with one. That doesn't work in poker or in life.
Tom DeLay's mug shot demonstrates a high "political intelligence." I bet if Bill Clinton, who has an even higher political intelligence, ever had a mug shot taken, he would do something similar.
Quite so, Mr. Roberts. They didn't call him "Slick Willie" for nothing.
Great point about DeLay's discipline. I don't think I could make my face "stay on message" under those circumstances.
I noticed something cool when I clicked through to the WaPo story about Judd Gregg's winning PowerBall ticket -- a link back to this entry. On the lower right of the page is a box with the most recent three blog references to the story, courtesy Technorati, and you can click through to see the full list of blogs commenting on the story.
Meanwhile, our local monopoly daily (the Tulsa World) continues to try to ignore the Internet, hiding behind a paid subscribers' wall.
Hi Michael. Tulsa World's attitude is more the rule than the exception. Further, there are bloggers who have been telling papers to 'get with it' on a fulltime basis, only to be consistently ignored. In this post, we noted Tim Porter's cries in the wilderness.
The post attracted a few significant comments from others who felt some frustration along these lines. One, 'kob', mentioned the Washington Post as well. And I noticed that the New York Times has begun following WaPo's lead, although it remains to be seen whether they would deign to post a link to a site as declassé as Mister Snitch...
There are many papers that just don't see the writing on the wall. Certainly at least some will fail, and their readership gobbled up by Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN or some other news service.
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