Via Greg Sargent and Steve Benen, the CBS Early Show last week took the disturbing step of interviewing a body language “expert” who claimed to be able to interpret Hillary Clinton’s feelings and thoughts as she gave her convention speech”:
In her speech to the Democratic convention Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton urged fellow Democrats to vote for Barack Obama, and she did it in no uncertain terms — verbally.
But did her body language match her words?
Body language expert and former FBI agent Joe Navarro says he doesn’t think so.
Navarro, who wrote the book “What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People,” explained to Early Show co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez Wednesday, “We need non-verbal (cues) to tell us what is important, what is significant, and what should we be looking for.”
And Clinton’s non-verbals, he says, were revealing.
“What we wanted to see was a Churchillian speech, something that would move her candidate to cross that magic fence. And she delivered a speech, but the gestures — the non-verbals that give us the emotion — really weren’t there.”
Navarro later added, “I think her message was supposed to be, ‘Hey, go with me and let’s vote for Barack.’ There should have been a lot more emotive displays, and we just simply did not see that.”
What a joke. If I wanted faux mind-reading, I would go to my local psychic and get the real (fake) thing.
On a related note, Matthew Yglesias argues convincingly that the John Kerry renaissance is the result of people not trying to divine the strategic motives shaping his every move:
For the past two years or so has been the first time in decades when it’s been clear that Kerry won’t ever be president, so his action can be — and be seen as — merely the actions of a United States Senator with a safe seat and a passionate concern for certain issues and causes. As with Al Gore’s somewhat similar liberation from Presidential ambitions, I think in part it’s about letting him find his own voice but also in large part about his voice finally being heard as his own rather than read through the lens of devious ambition.
There is no way to avoid the limitations of human perception and knowledge. As much as the media pretends to tell you otherwise, we can’t know why politicians do what they do or what they are thinking when they do it. Rather than spending a lot of time trying to guess at politicians’ motives and feelings (which usually leads to pathological narrative-driven commentary), why don’t we actually listen to what they say a bit more? If we wanted to get a bit crazy, we might even talk about the consequences of their policy proposals for the country…