The Body Language of Election Day

The article, taken from The Hunffington Post.com was written by Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks of Ojai, California. They have authored several books about relationships and body language. It is a spot-on tribute to the realness of Barack Obama and the lack of direction by McCain.

5. The Exploding Veep
The first big dose of revelatory body language came for us the morning of Election Day, when we finally saw the tape of Dick Cheney endorsing John McCain. If you missed it, here's the key moment: At the peak of the speech, Cheney belted out the punchline, "I believe the right leader for this moment in history is John McCain."

A split-second after these words left his mouth, he exploded into a coughing fit of epic proportions. It was as if his body, after a lifetime of concealment and control, could no longer keep from erupting when forced to utter another lie.

4. All The Way Hume
We switched over to Fox News from time to time, in order to get the far-right spin on the events of the evening. We were particularly interested to see what some of their cocky bombasts would look like eating large helpings of crow.


In body language terms, voice-flags are those vocal tones and tremors that communicate hidden emotions. Brit Hume's voice-flag was the one that stood out like a sore tongue. Throughout the evening, each time he was forced to announce one more McCain loss, he unconsciously lowered his voice to a sepulchral depth usually reserved for state funerals.

It was as if he was grieving more than the loss of his favorite candidate--he was mourning the declining fortunes of his employer and the movement it has trumpeted.

3. Taking The Tics Out Of Politics
In an earlier post we commented on the stunning array of tics, twitches and jaw-clenches that played across John McCain's face during the campaign.
If you study the tape of his concession speech on election night, though, you'll see very little of that kind of body language. Why? Where did it go? The answer is simple but has profound consequences for health and happiness.

The reason McCain's facial flickers were so quiet is that he wasn't trying to be two people at once. It requires body tension to feel anger but pretend it isn't there. It takes effort to seal off fear, and even more effort to whistle along pretending it was never there. "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways," says the Book of James, and during the campaign, McCain's instability played across his face incessantly.

Now, though, John McCain does not have to pretend to be anything he isn't. He doesn't have to be an honorable man trying to live inside his skin with a fear-mongering alien bent on winning by sowing seeds of hate. He's the better for it, and so are we.

2. The Crowd At Grant Park
We watched Obama's victory speech in a room with people ranging in age from 10 to 63, and all of us had tears in our eyes. Looking around the room, we saw the same emotions on our faces as we saw in the crowd at Grant Park. Some of them were crying tears of relief, others tears of pride, others pure elation.

Beyond emotion, though, the amazing phenomenon was the size of the crowd. We wondered what other event and what other person could inspire a couple hundred thousand people to stand out in the admittedly not-so-cold at midnight. They were there to celebrate Obama and to see history being made, but the looks on their faces told a deeper story: They were there to celebrate the triumph of love and hope over fear and divisiveness.

1. Power, Joy, Grief And Fatigue = One Whole Person
When Obama took the stage, we saw a man embodying a complex array of feeling. He looked tired, of course, and who wouldn't be?

A ten-year-old in the room, who hadn't heard of the death of Barack's grandmother, said "He looks sad." It takes a deeply integrated person to let his grief be visible on a night of overwhelming victory. This is a key to his personality, and bodes well for the future of his presidency. It takes enormous strength to let your vulnerabilities rest so comfortably in yourself that they can be readily seen.

There was one emotion we're glad was missing from Obama and the crowd in Grant Park: any sense of triumphant glee. We couldn't help wondering if it would have been present in McCain's supporters had the tables been turned. John McCain had to silence a few boos and jeers from his audience, but by and large they just looked sad, tired and meek.

Finally, we were deeply moved by Obama's body language at the end, in the easy way he brought forth the other members of his and Biden's family to share the stage. He seemed to melt into them, as if he knows deep in his bones that none of this is really about him as an individual ego.

There's a huge difference between needing to be the center of things and simply being in the middle of things. Somehow, despite all the adulation and glory (as well as the relentless attacks mounted by the other side) Obama still knows what he's known all along: he's one of us.

Fact. Spin. Rumor. Opinion. What Really Matters

Today is the first day of the rest of this presidential election. Pay close attention. Do not get sidetracked. This is a message to myself. I, too, got snookered by small-bore bickering and secondary ephemera. I sat in front of the television and listened as so-called surrogates for the candidates played gotcha with obfuscation, misdirection and outright lies. A presidential election is a game now, and we're not playing, we're getting played. With very few exceptions—hats off to you, David Gergen—nothing being said has much to do with the future of this country or the well-being of its citizens. As a wise woman said to me the other day, talking points and talking are two very different things.

Once again we find ourselves planting our flag amid rubble. Now it is the rubble of the American economy, with great financial institutions faltering and failing and the stock market every which way. Rubble has become the symbol of this country over the past eight years: the still-unaddressed rubble of a decimated New Orleans, the growing rubble on the streets of Iraq.

At such a time, considering whether a tanning bed was installed in the governor's mansion in Alaska amounts to holding a barbecue on the lip of the volcano. For months I have been wondering how anyone could believe that Barack Obama, who has worshiped at a Christian church in Chicago for many years, was a Muslim. Then in the space of a few hours I received dozens of copies of a bogus list of books the Republican vice presidential candidate had allegedly banned from a local library while serving as mayor. The right no longer holds the patent on cyberbull. It is everywhere.

Maybe this campaign, which looked so promising, so dedicated to real issues and real change a year ago, can now get back on course. The debates are nigh, and they are crucial. The country is in a mess. And in November its citizens must decide who has the integrity, the intellect, the principles to steer us out of it.

Voters must become educated consumers to make that decision. They must draw on multiple sources, not just one. They must be conscious of what is fact, what is spin and what is opinion in a media world in which pundits seem to outnumber reporters. For example, here's my opinion: the only good news in last week's economic earthquake was that the political dialogue took a turn toward the substantive. But John McCain took a sad turn—a U-turn—for the worse. For most of the past 20 years McCain was a senator who was sure and stubborn and stood for certain things, many of them things with which I disagree. But disagreement is honorable; shape-shifting is not. In the space of a single news cycle Senator McCain went from being a longtime supporter of deregulation to a man inveighing against the lack of government oversight in the financial markets. He railed against the greed of Wall Street when Wall Street has been the ancestral home of his party.

In a speech after the 2000 race, Senator McCain had this to say about shifting his stance on the flying of the Confederate flag: "I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles." Surrounded by the acolytes of Karl Rove, the carnivorous political operative who once savaged him, with a running mate he seems to have chosen out of calculation rather than the best interests of the country, Senator McCain last week was once again hedging principle in favor of victory. His party has been in power as the country has run aground, yet he and his people try to suggest that the same party with the same people and the same policies will somehow produce different results.

Anna Quindlen
Newsweek
September 29, 2008