The birth of cool?

Last week, the Guardian carried a feature on ‘The Coolest Mayor in America‘ – John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Fetterman’s success raises a few slightly trivial aesthetic questions about what it takes to be a successful politician. It also raises bigger, more profound ones as well.

Fetterman doesn’t look like the traditional buttoned up political clone. He looks like he’d fit blend in to the audience of a Slayer gig or a Biker Bar more than a sausage-on-a-stick reception at the civic centre. Even David Cameron has allowed himself to be photographed occassionally without a tie, but somehow I think that even this would be step too far for an ex-member of The Bullingdon Club….

Fetterman is 6′8″. He prefers overalls and work-boots to suits and ties, along with plenty of other signals chosen to communicate a no-nonsense non-superficial approach to problems.

He has tattoos on his arms to signal his commitment to his community (his postcode is on one arm, the dates of a couple of notable deaths that happened ‘on his watch’ appear on the other). It’s a signal of determination in an age in which politicians are seen to belong to a caste that is removed from the day-to-day life of the voters. It also signals an unwillingness to negotiate – perhaps, the acceptance of a mandate from his voters.

It should be noted at this point that very few textbooks on effective representation are very keen on politicians accepting mandates.

In an age where presentation itself has been seen to be self-defeating, one has to question if we’re simply in the kind of spiral that writers such as Douglas Rushkoff have been chronicling for some time now: A bidding war between marketeers and consumers to mask a sales pitch in peer-to-peer authenticity.

In Rushkoff’s Media Virus and Coercion, we see traditional marketing departments replaced by cool hunters – hip adults who position themselves as close to their market as they can in order to shorten the cycle between the street and the mainstream. We may absolutely distrust the big marketing campaigns now in a way that we didn’t – but there’s no evidence that the changes that have effected the marketing industry will ever hit a stable point of happy compromise in which marketeers and their customers trust each other.

This may not ultimately bode well for democracy either.

Fetterman’s politics appear to be reasonably progressive homespun populism. The presentation, though, offers yet another persona that politicians can subscribe to. And for those of us that are generally sceptical of personality politics, Fetterman offers some possible reassurance here.

In recent months, I’ve drawn up a range of personality types for politicians here:

• The judge
• The juror
• The ‘man in the white suit’
• The cleric
• The buccaneer

Fetterman offers us another couple of templates: A cynic would say that he is a ‘cool hunter’. A more charitable option would be that he is a civic social entrepreneur (his approach to climate change has more than a touch of the ’swords into ploughshares’ about it.

Carbon Caps = Hard Hats

My big question, though, concerns the decline of party politics. We seem to be saying that we don’t want them any more. Does a one-off vote for a single individual mean that our politics is more or less participative?

I’d say it’s the latter.