the first ten seconds >> by g.j. lau >> *spark-online issue ten

Perhaps you've heard your mother say "first impressions are last impressions," probably right as you were heading out the door for an interview for that first big job at McDonald's or Burger King. Well, it turns out your mother's intuition is backed up by experiments that show just how incredibly fast we make up our minds about people.

An article in the May 29, 2000, New Yorker reports on how social psychologists have demonstrated that it takes only about 10 to 15 seconds of videotape for someone to form a lasting impression about another person--in this case students ranking the performance of various teachers. And their snap impressions consistently matched up with those of other students who evaluated the same professors after spending an entire semester in their classrooms.

Ten seconds to form an indelible impression of someone's character and capabilities? Ten seconds to form an impression that will be stay with us even in the face of evidence that the first impression was a wrong impression.

Think about that the next time you watch a political commercial for the umpteenth time. If the researchers are right, most voters made up their minds about Gore and Bush during a one-minute sound bite on the evening news sometime last February. And the same research suggests that their first impression will be extremely hard to dislodge. If you don't think so, just ask Dan Quayle.

So here we have a political system that expends months of relentless politicking and tens of millions of dollars in what will be for the most part a futile effort to change that precious first impression. The irony is even greater when you realize that the influence of big money in politics stems directly from this protracted campaign season and the political advertising that consumes money in million dollar gulps.

This takes on added significance in a race where neither candidate holds much appeal beyond the diehard partisans who will vote for their party's candidate no matter who it is. I believe in a theory of thirds: one-third of the American public is consistently conservative, one-third is consistently liberal, and the other third is in the middle, leaning this way or that, depending on the issue.

It is this excluded "middle" third who will be the object of all that electioneering, and I'm guessing this year's middle third will be sorely tempted to sit this one out--in droves. For those folks, that first 10-second impression of both candidates was a bad first impression and it will be an uphill battle for either candidate to get much movement form the middle.

This vast expenditure of effort to achieve such a small shift in voter sentiment highlights a fundamental problem in American politics. In a very funny book by Bill Bryson called From Here to There, he points out that some countries have a terrible time figuring out how to do some simple thing that other countries have no problem with at all. His best example comes from Britain, where people routinely eat while holding their forks upside down, leading to all sorts of problems with peas.

For America, how we elect our politicians clearly falls into this category. What for America takes months and years and millions upon millions of dollars is handled far more efficiently in other countries. Iran provides an interesting example, especially given its rather intolerant theocratic reputation. As the latest elections to their Majlis shows, the Iranians have a reasonably fair election process. Their campaign season is very short, lasting only a few weeks from start to finish. Advertising by candidates is strictly limited. And get this: When the election is over, the winner actually gets to take office within a matter of a week or two.

The British have a couple of major differences that expedite their campaign process. The Prime Minister is allowed to call for an election at any point during his term, so the opposition party has to be ready to campaign on a moment's notice. For this reason, each major party elects its leaders separately from any election cycle. That way there is always someone ready to head up the party ticket in an election, eliminating the need for the long expensive primaries that increasingly complicate the American political process.

In the United States, active campaigning for the Presidency begins a full two years before Election Day and the process of fund-raising continues unabated the year round. And then there is that 2.5-month vacuum between Election Day and Inauguration Day, a holdover from the horse and buggy era when travel and events moved at a much slower pace. Here we are, the most advanced democracy in the world, supposedly, and our Constitutional timetable still runs as if we were a 19th Century agrarian society.

There are two major problems with how America elects its Presidents. The first is that the whole election cycle takes too damn long. If we were to shorten the campaign season, it would eliminate the need for all that advertising money because there wouldn't be enough time to run that many ads. Shorten the campaign season and you get campaigns that turn on well-defined positions instead of campaigns that turn on some candidate screwing up in a meaningless debate.

The other major problem is that picking and approving a president's Cabinet takes too damn long. I have a theory that every bad thing that happens to a first-term President happens in the first year, often in the first six months. This is due to the inexperience of the President and to the fact that it takes so long to get a team together that the Cabinet can't even begin to make sound decisions for at least a year after the Inauguration.

And why does it take so long to get a Cabinet together? Part of the problem is procedural. It takes forever to get a security clearance. The whole system is clogged while Cabinet and sub-Cabinet level officials await their clearances. The other big stumbling block is the Senate, where the process of advising and consenting to the President's Cabinet choices has become increasingly partisan.

Perhaps it is time for a presidential commission to be formed to take a look at these issues and to propose a Constitutional amendment aimed at speeding up the entire process. Why can't we shorten the election cycle down to two months and have a new President in office within one month after the election? Why can't the President-elect use that month to assemble a Cabinet and begin the process of security clearances? Why can't we take the Senate out of the process altogether or place it under a strict Constitutional mandate to complete the nomination process within 90 days? Why can't we manage this fundamental Constitutional process at least as efficiently as most of the rest of the world's democracies seem to be able to?