WASHINGTON — Voters have memorized Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s historic firsts on a Republican presidential ticket: first woman, first hockey mom, first moose-dresser. Now it turns out the 44-year-old Alaska governor has injected another groundbreaker into national politics.
She’s a winker. She winks on rope lines and at rallies. She winked at least six times at 70 million viewers on the vice-presidential debate platform opposite her rival, Sen. Joe Biden, who weighed in on the nonverbal communication scale by grinning like a nutcracker.
But it was the wink that ricocheted across America, leaving some voters smitten, some confused and others nauseated.
The wink is ambiguous, one of those intriguing signals of unspoken human communication that is difficult to decipher but impossible to ignore. Somewhere along the way, the wink became a signal of something playful, knowing, flirtatious or suave, depending on who is doing the winking and in what context.
In Latin America, it’s a sexual invitation; in Nigeria, a parental signal that it’s time for the kids to leave the room. Some in China consider it rude.
Here, a wink can change the meaning of a sentence: “My kid always gets straight A’s.” Wink. Wink.
It can invite camaraderie. The wink is a powerful gesture, much more so than the wave favored by politicians because it comes from the eyes, the gateway to the soul.
“The face is primo — it’s how we read each other. Much more than hand gestures, it plays an astounding role in how people bond or interpret each others’ behavior,” said Betsi Grabe, a telecommunications professor at Indiana University.
Grabe is co-author of the upcoming book, “Image Bite Politics,” about the visual framing of elections.
In order to achieve the desired effect, a wink requires mutual admiration and a receptive source. Any woman who has sat across from an unwelcome suitor can attest to this.
Otherwise, it tends to confuse people.
Those who already liked her were charmed. Those who disliked her were repelled.
It’s the undecided voters who most matter. Research shows that ambiguous gestures like a wink are risky on television, particularly when aimed at an audience that the speaker wants to persuade, said Erik Bucy, an expert in nonverbal communication at Indiana University and Grabe’s co-author.
“The viewer starts to evaluate the source more closely, and often the evaluation turns negative,” Bucy said.
So it could be argued that winking in a debate was a very “maverick” thing to do, though experts agree that any male candidate who winked as much as Palin did would be called sexist. In her case, though, it made for an instant hit on YouTube the next day, when a montage of the governor’s mischievous left eye was set to a Neal McCoy country-western carol, “Wink.” (“Don’t need to psychoanalyze or have a stiff drink … All she’s gotta do is just give me that wink.”)
Experts can’t remember any other candidate winking so much. Sure, there are photos of the occasional wink by the President George H.W. Bush, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, his Democratic rivals Sen. Barack Obama and Biden.
President Bush is a devoted winker: at a State of the Union address, during a news conference with the prime minister of Japan and, with somewhat unfortunate consequences, at the queen of England, just after inadvertently suggesting that she was around in 1776. She was not amused.
Ever since Richard Nixon mopped his sweaty brow in the 1960 presidential debate against John F. Kennedy, it has been well known that nonverbal cues weigh as heavily with voters as the millions of words uttered on the stump. It is in part why campaigns spend so much on media coaches.
As for the wink?
“It’s a Rorschach test,” said Kristen Monroe, an expert on political psychology at the University of California, Irvine. “People see in it what they want.”
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