The Celebrity Endorsement Flop

Hillary Clinton had a wide range of celebrity endorsements. Donald Trump publicly disavowed the Hollywood elite. Is this the end of celebrities and politics? BTP’s Ross Evans sat down with Professor Mark Wheeler — Professor of Political Communications at London Metropolitan University and author of ‘Celebrity Politics’ — to ask if star power really is waning in the eyes of voters.

ROSS EVANS So why didn’t Clinton’s celebrity endorsements work?

MARK WHEELER What went wrong with her celebrity endorsements was what went wrong in the wider sense: that Hillary Clinton was the figure of the establishment, she was the figure of entitlement. And also, rather than provide any change, she was going to provide continuity. Therefore, Hillary Clinton surrounding herself with celebrities like Beyoncé and various other Hollywood types ended up reinforcing an establishment position.

It’s worth bearing in mind that in America, the entertainment and political establishment have strong filial links which goes right back to the nineteenth century.

What a celebrity endorsement can do for you is enhance your profile. But there is a difficulty if you’re a certain kind of candidate. I think the endorsements didn’t work because they did not mesh with her narrative. In the past Barack Obama had done particularly well with certain types of celebrities. He had those entertainment figures linking in with a much more localised, organisational, grass-roots movement which he was tying into his wider campaign. So on the one side you had the entertainment tropes and traditional kind of image candidacy, but on the other side you had this strong communitarian organisation which orchestrated itself very effectively, especially in 2008.

ROSS Where exactly were Obama’s endorsements credible, where Clinton’s were not?

MARK Well you have to look at the turnout. Clinton’s turnout was significantly down even though it appears she’s going to win the popular vote by several million. Obama, particularly in 2008, was able to deal with voter registration issues. The important celebrity endorsement was Oprah Winfrey. She was vital in utilising her book club network. Networks like this go right to the heart of the way Obama and people like David Axelrod were running the campaign.

With Hillary Clinton you had a much more traditionalist notion of going to big money donors and the centres of the traditional mechanisms of American power: courting the stars, courting the people who are the permanent governance of the Hollywood and entertainment industries. She probably learnt this from her husband because he did it tremendously effectively in the early 90s. He had a coterie of people like Barbara Streisand, Richard Dreyfus, Mike Medevoy and others who were known as the ‘friends of Bill’. These people were very effective campaigners as well as fundraisers.

But there is now a greater bullishness among Republicans about celebrity status. Traditionally, because of what happened with the red scare and the divisions within Hollywood in terms of its politics from the 60s onwards, Hollywood has always been a huge resource for the Democrats.

ROSS Do you think the endorsements meshed with Obama’s candidacy because he employed the tools of celebrity himself in his campaign style?

MARK After losing out in 2008 to Obama, there was a sense of entitlement to Clinton’s candidacy this year. There was a perception that she felt it was her turn, whereas Obama seemed of the moment. He was able to create this kind of social movement: a populist vision because he wasn’t George Bush, because he was African-American, because he was articulate yet had experience in dealing with issues such as low income that affect poorer voters.

McCain claimed he was vacuous, labelling him the celebrity candidate. But Obama obviously had a greater degree of substance. He was then able to interlink it with certain types of celebrities who had credibility with younger voters. He had a great narrative: both of Kansas and Kenya. A person who had come from a disruptive background but had worked his way up through law school. So I think the celebrity endorsements can only work as well as the candidate. To some degree it comes down to something you’re born with: a charisma and a greater degree of affiliation with people. It’s a question of fit.

Hillary Clinton, by her own admissions, said she was a poor candidate in terms of those kind of things. With her, it was not so much an endorsement of the narrative, as endorsement of the candidacy. I’m not sure the youth saw how she connected with certain celebrities — and that’s reflected in the turnout. The sense of entitlement permeated out and undermined the political narrative.

ROSS Successful celebrity politicians have to navigate this tension between being simultaneously an insider and outsider (with regards to the establishment). How did Trump pull off his outsider role despite his background?

MARK There is a book by an author called Liesbet van Zoonen which talks about the perfect celebrity politician; the extent to which they have to be an insider and outsider and how they play that game. I think Trump’s rhetoric positioned him as the outsider. His twitter account was particularly important in this. The brashness of his comments allowed the public to trust it was his unmediated voice: he was “calling it like it is”. There is the perception that those inside the establishment have something to hide, that they don’t share their true thoughts with the public. That Trump’s voice was perceived to be unfiltered differentiated him from the establishment.

Initially, commentators declared his use of twitter as madness. But there appears to be method. What can you say in 140 characters? You’re not going to be doing the Gettysburg address; nor exploring the intricacies of policy. No, you play on the big tropes about immigration, about ISIS, about the wall. Strategically, he was as outrageous as he could be. The media then picked up on it, which was then retweeted. He has a celebrity capital that he realised he could mediate through traditional media and social media. He worked the two together, building momentum in stories which then reverberated into the wider public space.

ROSS There is another paradoxical tension in celebrity politicians: being both ordinary and extraordinary. Was ‘calling it like it is’ what made him seem ordinary?

MARK Yes, it tapped into what the American public had on its mind. His persona was the maverick politician — similar to Nigel Farage cultivating his ‘ordinary bloke image’. Now I don’t think Trump would go down the pub, smoke a cigarette and drink a pint of beer like Farage. But Trump did something else that Michael Moore has pointed out: the baseball caps.

Now at first, people mocked him in the studios of Washington for this. But he spent an enormous amount on caps because if you are working class and live in Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, you are likely to wear them. Everywhere he could, he wore the cap — even during speeches. He is the first American political candidate I’ve seen wearing this kind of gear.

But on the other hand, he had his extraordinary side. He said: ‘Because I’m wealthy, I can’t be bought. I’m not subject to special interests.’ He portrayed himself as an exceptional businessman, somebody who could cut a deal and turn America around. And he was already a brand. He wasn’t just Donald trump, he was the Trump of hotels and casinos with towers in New York and Chicago. So you definitely have these ordinary-extraordinary insider-outsider dynamics and Trump playing into these very successfully.

ROSS Obama deepened the use of the tools of the celebrity politician: the personalisation of politics, the use of the media spectacle, the elevation of the individual’s narrative. Should Trump therefore be seen as his natural electoral successor — at least in his employment of the same tools?

MARK Of course not in terms of policies and ideology, but there are elements of continuity because Obama had a definite star quality in his election campaigns. But as a president, he was a rational and prudent figure. There is a long history of celebrity in politics. However, Obama can be seen as a sea-change moving from an image candidate to a candidate with celebrity capital. So you can argue that there is a continuum in terms of celebrity politics, but it will play itself out in a rather divergent way.

Obama’s celebrity capital was different. It was the idea that he was this figure who had an innate intellect. Somebody of significance and depth in terms of his celebrity capital. Yes he had a picturesque family, yes he surrounded himself with celebrity endorsers. But at the time, his books were coming out, ‘The Audacity of Hope’ and ‘Dreams from My Father’, which served to reinforce his rational image. Of course, Donald’s Trump also has a book: ‘The Art of the Deal’. But it projects a very different picture (he also makes no bones about it being ghost-written). So they both play on their celebrity capital, but they are very different types of capital.

ROSS In light of Sarkozy, a politician who has used the tools of celebrity, losing in the primaries to Fillon, do you think we will begin to see a backlash against the celebrity politician model?

MARK Yes, Sarkozy- ‘Mr Bling-Bling’! There was a period in the late 90s when it was very much in vogue. You had Schroeder in Germany who was having extra-marital affairs and was always in ‘de Bild’; You had Tony Blair heading up ‘Cool Britannia’, inviting the likes of Noel Gallagher to Downing Street; You had Silvio Berlusconi as the media tycoon prime minister. However, due to a series of malfeasances on their part, the public have probably lost a degree of faith in the model of the charismatic celebrity politician- and the path they may lead you down.

I think you can see it in Corbyn’s popularity with certain parts of the British electorate. At the beginning of his leadership, he consciously made clear that Labour would ‘not do celebrity’. This resonated with people who had perhaps become disillusioned with New Labour. Paradoxically, this made him into a star, if an unlikely one. Although this was not necessarily unexpected. After all, through social media hashtags like #JezWeCan, he was deliberately playing on the tropes of Obama.

As in the past, I suppose the popularity of the model will go through peaks and troughs. It will always depend on how fitting the type of celebrity capital is to the circumstances.