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The image of a prison with a revolving door helped George Bush win the presidency in 1988, but did negative advertising damage the electoral process itself? Why did campaign ’88 represent an all-time low in the minds of many voters? These are some of the questions that impel this thought-provoking analysis of the 1988 presidential election, sponsored by the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation.

Using extensive empirical studies of the candidates, the media, and the voters, Bruce Buchanan, executive director of the Markle Commission on the Media and the Electorate, traces the roots of popular dissatisfaction with the 1988 election. Buchanan argues that the campaign drifted too far from popular ideals of how democratic processes ought to work—that the substitution of negative advertising and quickie “sound bites” for reasoned debate on national problems and issues alienated much of the electorate, causing the lowest voter turnout in sixty-four years.

Negative campaigning, however, cannot bear the full blame for the 1988 election. While the Markle Commission offers specific recommendations for improvements in candidate and media performance, the great need, says Buchanan, is for voters to reclaim the electoral process, to insist that candidates and the media give enough information about positions and programs for voters to make informed choices. Voters need to be educated out of the idea that democratic elections and representative government can somehow occur without the participation of ordinary citizens.

At a time when the American democratic process is being used as a model by newly independent nations around the world, it is particularly appropriate to ask how well it works at home. Electing a President does just that.

Robert Kennedy's abbreviated run for the presidency in 1968 has assumed almost mythical proportions in American memory. His campaign has been romanticized because of its tragic end, but also because of the foreign and domestic crises that surrounded it. Yet while most media coverage initially focused on Kennedy's opposition to the Vietnam War as the catalyst of his candidacy, another issue commanded just as much of his attention. That issue was poverty. Stumping across the country, he repeated the same antipoverty themes before college students in Kansas and Indiana, loggers and women factory workers in Oregon, farmers in Nebraska, and business groups in New York. Although his calls to action sometimes met with apathy, he refused to modify his message. “If they don't care,” he told one aide, “the hell with them.”

As Edward R. Schmitt demonstrates, Kennedy's concern with the problem of poverty was not new. Although critics at the time accused him of opportunistically veering left in order to outflank an unpopular president, a closer look at the historical record reveals a steady evolution rather than a dramatic shift in his politics.

Why did Barack Obama court Jon Stewart and trade jokes with Stephen Colbert during the campaign of 2008? Why did Sarah Palin forgo the opportunity to earn votes on the Sunday morning political talk shows but embrace the chance to get laughs on Saturday Night Live? The Dance of the Comedians examines the history behind these questions—the merry, mocking, and highly contested anarchies of standup political comedy that have locked humorists, presidents, and their fellow Americans in an improvisational three-way “dance” since the early years of the American republic. 

Peter M. Robinson shows how the performance of political humor developed as a celebration of democracy and an expression of political power, protest, and commercial profit. He places special significance on the middle half of the twentieth century, when presidents and comedians alike—from Calvin Coolidge to Ronald Reagan, from Will Rogers to Saturday Night Live's “Not Ready for Prime Time Players”—developed modern understandings of the power of laughter to affect popular opinion and political agendas, only to find the American audience increasingly willing and able to get in on the act. These years put the long-standing traditions of presidential deference profoundly in play as all three parties to American political humor—the people, the presidents, and the comedy professionals—negotiated their way between reverence for the office of the presidency and ridicule of its occupants. 

Although the focus is on humor, The Dance of the Comedians illuminates the process by which Americans have come to recognize that the performance of political comedy has serious and profound consequences for those on all sides of the punch line.

“For generations, my family has had the great privilege of serving the people of Wisconsin. In Wisconsin for Kennedy, B.J. Hollars performs his own act of service, recounting the riveting and untold story of Wisconsin’s politically perilous 1960 primary. A poignant contribution to political history that reads like a page-turner.” 
—Former Wisconsin Governor James Doyle Jr. 


"A hopeful quality . . . pervades Wisconsin for Kennedy, written about a time and place when politics was conducted in a less severe and divisive way than it is now. Hollars further succeeds in showing how political history is made by a wide range of citizens. Wisconsinites, Midwesterners, and indeed Americans of all political persuasions can be grateful to B.J. Hollars for these important reminders." 
— Middle West Review