Claire Does A Mock Debate
From Modern Family (Season 3, Episode 13, “Little Bo Bleep”)
Categories:
Run time: 1:33
Clip Description: In this clip from Modern Family, after local media branded her as “angry and unlikable,” Claire gets “help” from her family to fix her behavior ahead of her formal political debate for City Council against incumbent Duane Bailey.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip can be used to help show the importance of both messaging and public image in election campaigning.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip can be used to show messaging and public image during election campaigning.
Discussion Questions
- Debate preparation is coaching a candidate on how to seem. Most research on televised debates finds fairly small effects on final vote choice, and yet campaigns pour time and money into preparing for them. Give the best explanation for that gap. Are campaigns behaving irrationally, or are debates doing something — setting the terms of coverage afterward, reassuring donors, steadying the candidate’s own side — that the vote-choice studies were never measuring?
- We tell candidates to be authentic and then reward the ones who have rehearsed authenticity successfully. Before you call that a distortion, make the opposite case seriously: persuading people, holding a room, and staying calm under hostile questioning are a large share of what an elected official actually does. Where does legitimate evidence of competence end and pure performance begin, and is there any part of the job where the two come apart cleanly?
- The candidate being coached here is a woman running for local office. Voters tell pollsters they care about warmth and likability, and there is reason to think the standard is not applied identically to men and women. Bring to mind a specific candidate you found off-putting and write down exactly what it was — the voice, the laugh, the certainty, the hedging. Then ask whether you would have registered the same trait in someone else.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.