'Polioptics' or How to Make a Leader Look Good

Broadly speaking, polioptics apply to the way any public figure is presented, while governing, campaigning or just hanging out. Think George W. Bush at Ground Zero (high PO value). Then think of him on a carrier deck under that "mission accomplished" banner (truly abysmal PO quotient). Then think of him biking in shorts (your call).

Josh King, who spent five years as Bill Clinton's director of production for presidential events at the White House, says he coined the term to describe the art of making a leader look dignified, empathetic, resolute, conciliatory, or just plain aw-shucks real when viewed through a camera lens or television screen. For Clinton, it ranged from passing out bottled water in flood-ravaged Iowa to spreading welcoming arms behind Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands over a Middle East peace accord. (Hey, we're talking photo ops here, not permanent outcomes.)

Clinton was hardly the first optipol. "Ronald Reagan has no peer as communicator," says King, who counts Michael Deaver, the Gipper's gifted p.r. guru, as an early idol. This image-meister knew well the value of posing the boss atop the Great Wall of China, dining with Nancy on TV trays in the White House family quarters, walking the beach at Normandy, and, at the very end, being laid to rest on national television as the sun set over the Pacific. (In a classic and inexplicable case of polioptics run grievously amok, Deaver let himself to be posed for a Time cover on influence-peddling lobbyists while talking on the phone inside a limo in front of the Capitol.)

Every presidential contender since Clinton has benefited from new technology, allowing Obama and Mitt Romney to create some of the best-ever polioptic moments, says King. On Tuesday night he delivered a punchy, illustrated history of this visual tactic at George Washington University, starting with a pre-presidential GW himself. "It goes back to oil on canvas, of Washington crossing the Delaware, and continues today to Scott Brown in a pickup truck," he told me by phone from New York, where he's a senior veep at Willis Holdings, a global insurance broker.

When Abe Lincoln went to Antietam for a showdown with Union Gen. George McClellan during the Civil War, he brought along photographer Alexander Gardner. "The president went to read McClellan the riot act about taking the war to the Confederates. He was wearing his top hat, and towering two feet over the general," says King. (Very high PO marks.)

A century later, Lyndon Johnson grossed out a goodly portion of the electorate by showing off his gall bladder scar and being photographed on the john. But he flat out intimidated lawmakers who'd seen pictures of him "leaning on and buttonholing" their colleagues in the East Room.

"Whether it's Reagan clearing brush at the ranch or Obama playing basketball, what they do naturally and how they do it counts for a lot, and maybe it's a better window into who these people standing on the platform giving a speech really are," says King.

Plan on seeing a lot more of Scott Brown's polioptic pickup truck.