NEWS .

Opening Their Wounds

In talking about taking a bullet, two mayoral candidates might connect with some voters.


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Published: Jan 17, 2007

news analysis

Back when he was still a correspondent on The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert did a great bit notable for its use of the term "goat-ball licker." Jon Stewart was discussing the tendency of political candidates to cite their ancestors' occupations — mill worker, coal miner, etc. — as evidence of their working-class bona fides. He suggested to Colbert, who was playing the role of analyst, that these appeals rang hollow. Colbert disagreed.

"I, for one, connected with what they were saying," Colbert said. "Then again, I myself am from humble origins. My father was a poor Virginia turd miner." And later, "My father's father was a goat-ball licker."

This gambit came to mind last week in Philadelphia when, in a much darker iteration of the same theme, mayoral candidates Chaka Fattah and Dwight Evans introduced their anti-violence platforms by recollecting their personal experiences with gun violence. Fattah said he'd been shot in the leg while trying to break up a street fight; Evans, that he was clipped in the ear when a cafeteria co-worker dropped a gun and it went off.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the disturbing revelation that 50 percent of the city's declared mayoral candidates have taken bullets, this got us wondering: What does this particular piece of biographical information accomplish for a mayoral candidate? Will voters view getting shot as an experience that adds to Fattah's and Evans' credibility on violence? Or are they just crying goat-ball licker?

Research has shown that voters look for credibility in political candidates, and "personal experience is at the top of the list of major factors" contributing to that, e-mails Kevin Arceneaux, assistant professor of political science at Temple University. Another Temple poli-sci professor, Michael Hagen, explains that this is because busy voters are "looking for easily digestible pieces of information" that tell them something about each candidate. Because personal experience is anecdotal, it goes down pretty smooth.

But "personal experience" is a broad term. Some experiences are clearly relevant to public office, such as holding a job performing similar duties. Some are more ambiguous. In American politics, one of the most oft-discussed is military service, which politicians cite as evidence of their character and to imply an expertise in matters of war. Detractors argue that fighting in a war has little to do with running one.

Being the victim of a shooting is a unique — and relatively rare — personal experience for a politician to cite in a campaign. Unlike military service, observes Arceneaux, "people don't choose to be victims of crimes," so the misfortune doesn't demonstrate anything about their moral fiber (Fattah's experience being something of an exception because he was attempting to break up a fight). It's also a brief experience, so the victim doesn't gain any expertise about how shootings work or, more importantly, how to prevent them.

But in a city that racked up 406 murders last year, and countless more gun-related injuries, a bullet wound communicates something else voters may be looking for: empathy. I have experienced this, Fattah and Evans can say. I know how bad it is, and that impassions me to solve the problem. This will, at the very least, paint a contrast with the weirdly detached Mayor Street, who opens discussions of violence with a long list of his accomplishments.

In a broader sense, saying "I've been shot" in a city plagued by gun violence communicates to voters that Fattah and Evans are truly of the city they hope to serve — connected to, and affected by, its problems. And while it won't give them moral authority over any National Rifle Association members, it may help to distinguish them in a race where all of the candidates will be targeting guns as a problem.

"Will this give [them] credibility on this issue?" asks Arceneaux. "My guess is that for most voters, it will."

But there is a caveat. Voters respect experience, notes Arceneaux, but "they don't like ostentation." Think, for instance, of John Kerry's hideous "Band of Brothers" theme at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

In the world of urban violence, such political showboating is particularly loathsome because it glorifies the problem it's supposed to highlight. Rather than I know how bad this is, it says to people, I am cool because this happened to me.

Fattah inched close to the delicate line between empathy and ego when he told the Inquirer that at the time of his shooting, he was worried what effect the wound would have on his basketball playing. In fact, the Inky reported that Fattah now "wears the experience as a badge of honor." (Hey Congressman: If getting shot is a badge of honor, won't other people want one?)

But both Fattah and Evans have been in politics a long time, and neither has made a big to-do about his gun wounds before — neither has entered the goat-ball zone. Last week, each used his story as a way to personalize the pervasive gun violence in the city before presenting a detailed anti-violence proposal.

That's exactly what they should have done.

(doron@citypaper.net)