Wish I'd Thought Of That: HDTV Vs. McCain

Over at Slate, Timothy Noah wonders: will appearing in high-definition on TV be unkind to John McCain?

Last year, when McCain's candidacy appeared to be in serious trouble, you heard a lot about how awful he looked. He'd gotten old, his face was scarred from melanoma surgery; no wonder his presidential run was headed south. Then McCain started racking up primary victories, and his telegenic deficit was forgotten. I don't watch TV news much—with two kids, who has the time?—and what news clips I see tend to be off the Web. On cable-news sites and YouTube, McCain looked fine to me.

Then, on May 17, I watched Saturday Night Live with my kids. McCain appeared in close-up in a mildly amusing skit whose purpose (at least from McCain's perspective) was to remove the age issue from voters' minds by turning it into a joke. It worked for Ronald Reagan in 1984; why shouldn't it work for McCain in 2008? With me, though, it had the exact opposite effect. As someone who'd pooh-poohed the age issue, I found myself gasping at McCain's mug as transmitted in glorious HDTV. Wrinkles, blotches, liver spots, scarry tissue—none of these were hidden by McCain's makeup. As McCain cracked wise ("What do we want in our next president? Certainly someone who is very, very, very old."), I found myself thinking, Jeez, he doesn't look like a guy who'll turn 72 this August. He looks like a guy who'll turn 82.

I know, I know, it's a shallow consideration. But elections turn on shallow matters of telegenicity—see Nixon's defeat, and his subsequent election, Gore's eye-rolling, the Reagan presidency—and it's a great question to ask. I don't have an answer, partly because, come to think of it, I haven't yet seen McCain much in HDTV (most of my cable-news viewing is in standard-def). And that may be true of most Americans too. But it's possible that could actually exaggerate HDTV's impact on the age issue; millions of Americans may get their first close look at McCain in HD at the GOP convention or the fall TV debates, closer to the general election.

The flip side is that McCain may be able to jujitsu the age question, as Reagan once did and as he attempted to by dryly selling his "oldness" on SNL. Then again, Bob Dole was pretty dryly funny, too.