Tears, good or bad for candidates?

After the successful 2002 tear-jerker, candidates appeal to voter emotion

Tears of politicians have been viewed as a weapon to touch the hearts of voters over the past decade after Roh Moo-hyun benefitted from a 2002 presidential TV advertisement featuring his tears.

Recently, both Park Geun-hye of the Saenuri Party and the Democratic United Party’s (DUP) Moon Jae-in shed tears in public, stirring speculation whether their tears, intended or not, would also help them consolidate supporters or backfire against them.

Kim Dong-kyu, a professor of communications at Busan-based Tongmyong University, told The Korea Times Wednesday that he believed in the power of tears in politics, predicting this will also work in the December election.

“There is no doubt that the tears of candidates are a powerful thing that can touch the hearts of people in favor of them, especially when the race is neck-and-neck just like the ongoing election,” he said.

Kim, also an expert of political ads, said the late President Roh was the beneficiary of tear-jerker TV advertising aimed at arousing voters’ compassion toward him with his tears.

“During the 2002 presidential election, people in the advertising industry shared the view that the Roh camp had a stronger political ad team than that of Lee Hoi-chang who ran in the race unsuccessfully,” he said.

The Roh camp adopted the campaign tactic to use tears and other images showing his humanity to arouse voters’ compassion in favor of Roh for the first time, he said. The image advertising had already been widely used in commercial ads before.

“It turned out the new tear-jerker campaign tactic was very successful.”

When facing a complex situation to make a decision, such as selecting their candidate from a list of many, people tend to pick specific aspects of available information based on their perspective, beliefs, attitudes and decisions. Voters do this partly because they don’t have enough time to compare all candidates running in election, or partly because their understanding of campaign pledges is limited.

So these voters make their decision instantly based on the image of a candidate that popped up in short TV ads or slogans or their perception shaped through the fragments of exposed information.

Roh’s tears

The famous tear-jerker in question was the first in a series of TV ads aired by major broadcasters during the 2002 presidential election.

It ran for one minute and 14 seconds, featuring Roh’s rise from a humble beginning to a star politician with the background music of the legendary Beatles’ song of Imagine.

In the ad, the late President, surrounded by farmers, drank magkoli near a rice field on the farmland and later in the short film he wiped away tears on his cheeks while listening to a speech delivered by actor Moon Sung-keun, one of his best friends.

The TV ad was a big hit that everybody talked about.

Kim said the 2002 election results demonstrated how powerful touching TV ads were.

“The situation in the 2007 presidential election was different. At that time, the Grand National Party candidate Lee Myung-bak was unrivaled in public opinion surveys and led the presidential race with a wide gap with his rival Chung Dong-young of the then Democratic Party,” he said.

“TV ads revealed limitations to change the election landscape.”

But, he predicted, tear-jerker TV ads will play a significant role in the Dec. 19 election as a tight race is underway between Park and Moon.

Park, Moon weep

This week, Park Geun-hye, presidential candidate of the ruling Saenuri Party, was spotted by cameras with teary eyes at a memorial service for her long-time aide Lee Chun-sang held at the Catholic University Hospital in Seoul.

Her eyelids and cheeks were swollen, showing she wept quite a lot after losing Lee, who had worked for her for 15 years, in a car accident Sunday. The late Lee was described as one of the four insiders’ of the Park camp.

Park held the hands of the late Lee’s bereaved wife and son to console them. Amid anguish, Lee’s wife expressed her hope for the candidate to run successfully in the race. In response, the sad-looking Park said she would, promising that she would do her best to make her wish come true.

This is the first time that the daughter of the late President Park Chung-hee has wept in public. Prior to this, Park had gone through a variety of ordeals, including losing both her parents who were assassinated and an 18-year-long ordeal of living as the daughter of the late president whose political legacy was controversial. But she never appeared weeping in public.

In October, her rival Moon Jae-in of the main opposition Democratic United Party (DUP) was shown in a photo wiping tears from his cheeks after taking off his glasses with one hand.

He became weepy after watching the blockbuster film, “Gwanghae: The Man Who Became King” directed by Choo Chang-min.

The movie described a low-class citizen’s 15-day experience as a surrogate king of the Jeoseon Kingdom with the support of an aide.

Director Choo reportedly got the inspiration to make the film to highlight Moon, who served as presidential chief of staff to the late Roh. The film stirred speculation that the surrogate king in the movie was the late Roh and the aide was Moon.

The movie drew more than 10 million people.

Two months later, Moon wept again while watching a painting portraying an infant trying to reach out to his mother, who was shot dead during the April 3 uprising on Jeju Island, for breast-feeding.

As the candidate was spotted weeping twice, Moon got the nickname of “a crying man.”

Humor, new tactic

Choi Jin, the head of the Seoul-based think tank Institute of Presidential Leadership, said that candidates’ tears would have been interpreted by voters differently as their sources of their sorrow were different.

Park’s tears came from her deep sense of loss, whereas Moon wept as he was touched by the film as it reminded him of his late boss who was also his friend, he said.

Overall, however, Choi remained skeptical about the role of tear-jerker TV ads in helping candidates garner more support from voters in the upcoming election.

“I think that compassion-oriented campaign tactics will no longer work in elections. It’s true that these tactics worked in previous elections, but this won’t be the case for the upcoming one,” he said.

“I believe so because these days people don’t want to see the tears of the candidates anymore, because the economy is bad,” he said. “People want to see and hear something positive and pleasant as they live in an era of economic recession.”

Rather, the presidential leadership expert proposed that the candidates sharpen their skill to develop a sense of humor for their campaign.

Park sometimes used jokes as an icebreaker, while Moon rarely uses them.

In August, Park tried a joke when delivering a speech to a forum on easing household burdens from college tuition fees held in Seoul. Most of her audience were college students from 39 universities who took the forum seriously.

She argued that the weight of people’s loved one’s heart is 2.4 kilograms. Her explanation goes like this. Those who are in love tend to have rapid heartbeats, “doo-geun doo-geun” in Korean, when they see their loved one. The pronunciation of doo-geun is equivalent to 1.2 kilogram in Korean. As the word repeats twice, it equals to 2.4 kilogram. The average weight of a human heart is approximately 226 to 340 grams.

The candidate laughed as soon as she finished the joke, but her audience remained cool, indicating she needs to work on her sense of humor more.

Her rival Moon is portrayed as a serious man, and compared with Park, he rarely uses humor in public speech.

He used a joke once after he launched the presidential campaign. Earlier, he was asked to answer the tricky question of which region he came from in his campaign in the southeastern port city of Busan, the ruling Saenuri Party’s home turf.

He was asked such a question because the rival province of Jeolla is his party’s stronghold, which Korean politicians often call their political hometown, but he is originally from Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province, a neighboring location of Busan.

Moon answered, “I am the biological son of South Gyeongsang Province.” <The Korea Times/Kang Hyun-kyung>