Brewer and Obama

by Duffy McMahon on January 26, 2012 • No comments

One of my favorite television shows was “Lie To Me”. The lead character, Dr. Cal Lightman, is based on the life and work of Paul Ekman, Ph.D. Dr. Ekman is the leading authority on the study of emotions and their relations to facial expression and body language. What does that mean? The simplest answer is, a person’s deception may be betrayed by his or her demeanor. Your facial expressions, hand and body movement show your true feelings. Dr. Ekman teaches you how to determine if someone is lying.

While Dr. Ekman may, or may not, be of interest to anyone else but me, I thought of him last night while watching the news regarding the meeting between Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona and President Obama. I was astounded that a Governor would break protocol and hand the President a letter inviting him to lunch and tour of the border. Governor Brewer, this isn’t high school where you give a note to a classmate. This was a Presidential visit to your state. And you, as a Governor, should know the procedures for setting up a meeting with the President of The United States. And I don’t think handing him a note in an envelope on the airport tarmac is the standard method.

Governor Brewer, who appears to be basking in the limelight of all this publicity, has been on every conceivable news station offering her view of their encounter. I watched and listened as Governor Brewer defended her stance, but mostly promote her book. One of the problems the Governor has doing an interview is, she tends not to remember what she said in the last one. In one news story she said President Obama was the first one to bring up her book. In another interview she said she asked the President if he’d read her book. But in all the interviews she sounds like she’s peddling her book and using his response as an endorsement. And, it’s working. Sales were up dramatically today. I personally, find it hard to fathom, with everything written about the President, both positive and negative, that the Governor’s book had the impact she presents. Maybe the Governor might consider the President’s actions might have been, in part, due to her inappropriate behavior as Head of This State. He wasn’t there to talk about immigration.

In several of the Governor’s interviews she mentioned her stand on immigration and talked about her agenda. The problem with agenda’s, from a psychological standpoint, is that the person with the agenda becomes myopic. They don’t see beyond their own point of view. Their brains are in a state of hyper-alertness and everything said or done becomes a point of contention and can be taken as an insult. In this brain state the person rarely hears or remembers what’s said and done. Sound familiar?

Governor Brewer says she doesn’t really remember what they were discussing when asked about the photograph showing her pointing her finger at the President. She justifies it by saying, she talks with her hands and wasn’t being hostile. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and this one is priceless. According to Dr. Ekman, pointing a finger at a person is a confrontational action and is strongly associated with anger directed at that person. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

The fun thing about having read Dr. Ekman’s books and studied micro-expressions is, you learn to read people. And, I have to admit, after watching Governor Brewer last night, she may think she’s being truthful, but her demeanor betrays her. It’s almost as if she’s attempting to “Lie To Me”.

This is Duffy on Your Mind