Two of the most striking female personalities of the second half of the twentieth century were Jackie Onassis and Diana, Princess of Wales. Jackie O and Di: we all feel we have a strong sense of who they were.
Can you remember a single thing either of them ever said?
As American commentator Camille Paglia has pointed out, the two of them were, in effect, silent screen stars. They conveyed a sense of themselves by how they dressed, how they acted, how they looked, how they registered emotion. But not by what they said.
In many ways, they are perfect examples of the power of the visual image in the TV age. They anointed themselves as Queens for the TV age.
People talk about celebrity leadership, but that is not quite right. Celebrities are not leaders. They are a focus for public fantasies but, beyond that, stand for nothing but themselves, which is why so many of them lead such vain and trivial lives.
What modern leaders do, however, is use the techniques of being a celebrity as tools of leadership. They still need words, but they use them less than in the past and visual techniques more.
The most complete example of that is Ronald Reagan, former actor, former President of the United States. He was a great user of all the techniques of communication: the look, the gesture, the occasion, the word, the tone of voice, the striking phrase. And he was surrounded by people who worked with his understanding of those techniques.
A much-repeated story tells of American Public Broadcasting System reporter Lesley Stahl who put together what she thought was a devastating critique of Reagan's Presidency. After it aired, a senior Reagan staffer rang her up and thanked her for the documentary.
But, the baffled reporter said, the documentary was very hostile. Oh, was the reply, that was just the narration, no-one remembers that and the pictures were great.
Clinton, newly retired US President and a much less substantial figure (in all senses: what phrases of his will linger apart from "I did not inhale" and "I did not have sex with that woman"?) was equally skilled in the celebrity techniques of visual leadership.
No more so than when, having been elected as a centrist new Democrat, he promptly tried to nationalise a sixth of the US economy (with his wife Hilary Rodham Clinton's abortive health care "reform"), was punished by a Republican take-over of Congress in the 1994 mid-term elections and, with startlingly fancy footwork, remade himself as a centrist, "triangulating" against both the Republicans and the Democrats in Congress.
What is particularly striking in his case is that the American public were able to distinguish between Clinton as President (who they felt had done a good job) and Clinton as person (who they came to have little time for -- and even less now: by contrast, Reagan's reputation continues to rise).
Leadership through celebrity techniques pertains to the leadership, rather than the person.
Reagan's last great political act -- releasing the letter announcing his degenerative Alzheimers' two days before the 1994 congressional elections -- was a final statement of brilliantly timed use of celebrity techniques.
What can one say about a man who uses the official diagnosis of his own senility as a political weapon? Except express one's awe at such use of personal tragedy to activate powerful political sentiment.
Sporting leadership remains something done within shouting distance of one's players. So leadership there has not changed in its essentials because of the advent of the visual age, though the packaging of sporting figures as celebrity figures certainly has.
The quasi-leadership role commentators sought to impose on Australian sprinter Cathy Freeman was quite unreasonable. The grace with which she dealt with it says much about her, the unreasonableness of the demand says much about the modern media.
Advocacy groups seek to reach people through TV, but focus on issues and organisation brand-name rather than personal leadership.
Union leadership also seeks to reach people through TV -- most obviously in the sophisticated use of media by the Maritime Union of Australia leadership during the waterfront dispute. But their current focus on public campaigning is a reaction to decline and weakness, not an expression of strength.
The advent of such campaigning in Australia will, however, as it has done in the US, impose new demands on business leaders.
But political leadership remains the form of leadership most transformed by the demands of a visual age. Queenslanders have just seem two great case-studies in such leadership in a visual age.
First was Premier Peter Beattie. He did just about everything right. He understands the first rule of scandal -- the real killer is the cover-up. So the rorts affair was dealt with by public inquiry, public punishment and public acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
His whole visual persona is of comfortable ordinariness. He looks perfectly comfortable being slightly ridiculous holding a piglet, floating with sharks or whatever. Any amusement is shared with him, not against him.
In an age of spin and evasion, he is excellent at the public mea culpa.
He is very effective at dealing with questions, he looks comfortable with them. His ability to give sparkling answers helps ensure he may be comfortable, but he is far from dull. In fact, decent, approachable comfort is the unifying theme of his public persona.
Which, in the circumstances, was just what the electorate wanted.
The contrast with a divided alternative who couldn't even organise a photo opportunity properly could not have been greater.
The other great example of visual leadership is Pauline Hanson. Pauline would not have got to first base if, under constant pressure from journalists and commentators who use cultural issues to parade their own virtue, mainstream liberal-conservative politicians had not caved in and vacated from seriously contesting issues such as immigration and indigenous affairs.
Hence various forms of "separate development" are treated in mainstream public debate as the only acceptable policies for indigenous affairs. The only way one can vote for colour-blind public policy in this country is to vote for One Nation -- note the name. This is what gives Pauline Hanson the key basis of her support (a fact for which the Liberal and National Parties have no one to blame but their own incompetence at cultural politics).
Those stifled, indeed vilified, sentiments give her an audience. Leadership has to have substance to sustain it. But the ludicrously over-the-top vilification of Pauline Hanson has provided her with a starring role in a grand public drama.
In a pre-packaged age Hanson speaks her mind. She can be clumsy, awkward, inarticulate, visibly nervous. But that just makes her seem more authentically a voice of stifled, ordinary people.
The sheer courage she has displayed has been one of the more remarkable features of their whole saga. Indeed, she has displayed far more courage than the ravening herd of elite commentators who have screamed at her so as to shore up their own public displays of conspicuous virtue.
She has also displayed a capacity to learn on the job, something people can also identify with and admire. The recent use of dresses as fashion statements is perfectly in synch with the use of celebrity techniques in a visual age. It is something that those two aristocrats, Jackie and Di, understood completely.
The leadership celebrity techniques in a visual age are demotic: as open to a fish-and-chip shop owner as an American Queen of Camelot or an English People's Princess.
Does the shift from overwhelming reliance on words to far more reliance on visual image somehow debase political leadership and political processes? I see no particular evidence for it.
Polling does show that people identify less closely with particular political parties than in the past: but it also shows that they are more likely to be able to pick differences between parties and more likely to follow political events.
The best book on campaigning, Samuel Popkin's The Reasoning Voter, brings out the underlying rationality in the use by voters of the information cues modern campaigning gives them.
They remember past behaviour, they judge words against actions, they infer from character to behaviour. And there is nothing irrational in the recent election results.
In many ways, governments are far more accountable now than they have ever been in Australian history -- which is why there are no incumbent Governments, State or Federal, who were in power 10 years ago. (The Northern Territory remains a place where they do things differently).
There is a problem with the moral vanity of journalists and commentators narrowing the range of public debate, but the One Nation phenomena is providing a (somewhat hair-raising) corrective to that. More to the point, the power of the visual is a reality cannot be changed in a democratic polity. Politicians must adapt to it or fail.
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