Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

Hoping to provoke a little candor among the six Republican presidential candidates on his television show, William F. Buckley Jr. asked Pierre du Pont why he would be a better choice than Jack Kemp. As du Pont began to answer with practiced evasion, Bob Dole broke in: "You're looking at me. Kemp's over there." "Yeah," replied du Pont evenly, "but the camera's behind you." Television, once the terror of politicians because it revealed character, now merely shows their carefully fashioned synthetic facades.

More than ever in the age of Ronald Reagan, television smarts are required job skills for presidential candidates. The Republicans, like the Democratic candidates a few weeks earlier, were articulate, amiable, pat, well coached and sincere as all get-out. It should have been more impressive. Hubert Humphrey or Dwight Eisenhower or Lyndon Johnson would never have been able to compact his message into two minutes -- each was a rambler -- but they were abler politicians than this lot. When performance on television is the chief criterion, two preachers such as Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson, who have never drafted legislation, governed a state or even served on a city council, seem just as qualified for the presidency as those who have.

This equalizing effect occurs because television most rewards not words or achievements but coronas of personality. Ted Koppel often seems more knowledgeable than the experts he questions, and George Will triumphantly bolder than Cabinet members who, unlike him, must bear policy responsibility for what they say. It took another corona of personality, Ronald Reagan, to reduce the dominance of the Washington scene by television journalists. He did it, this experienced actor, by disdaining the press and carefully controlling his public appearances. And he did it negatively by subjecting reporters to the humiliation of shouting questions over the helicopter's roar. Artificial as these tactics were, they helped him sustain the popularity essential to any ! effective presidency. But the trick has worn out, as do all long-running television acts. When Reagan tried to counter the Wall Street crash with one- liners shouted over the rotor blades, it was not Sam Donaldson but Ronald Reagan who looked inadequate.

Washington figures can be divided into those who have and those who have not developed the impervious veneer required by television -- that ability to duck an awkward question by talking about something else, the talent to pat-a- cake thoughts into little mouthfuls suitable for stopwatch programming. Of all the Senators and Congressmen on exhibit in recent televised hearings, Teddy Kennedy has the most undentable carapace. Many who watched the Bork hearings concluded that Kennedy and Utah's sycophantic Orrin Hatch vied in giving the worst performances. Yet Kennedy dominated the evening news coverage by crafting his wild charges into the little sound bites so dear to news producers.

Those who watched the Iran and Bork hearings were reminded of how inadequate a capsule summary can be if you've seen the movie. Less familiar committee members -- Inouye, Hamilton, Mitchell, Specter, Simpson -- appealed just because their humanity hadn't vanished behind a professional veneer. They were earnest, perhaps a little verbose, sometimes eloquent, decidedly human, and a welcome change from the usual Washington sound-bite sophisticate.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the 1988 crop of presidential candidates, flicking around the country, answering or ducking questions they had heard before, should become so practiced and unreal. Watching them perform for two hours, a viewer could not say he now knew them better. He had only caught their act.