Several readers pointed out that the style grades seemed far more determinative of the overall scores than the substance grades. But only one reader that I know of, Princeton professor Sam Wang, aligned all the grades on a graph to illustrate the point conclusively: Halperin's overall grades essentially conflated style and quality. Wang's summary was worthy of a bumper sticker for political cynics everywhere: "Substance can bring you down, never up."

Mark Halperin Hands Out Grades

In the early twentieth century, the famous acting coach Constantin Stanislavski devised a theater method that called for "psycho-physical unity." The central conceit is that when actors get a part, they ought to plumb their emotional memories and their arsenal of physical gestures to fully render the psychological life of the prescribed character. In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski wrote:

All of our acts, even the simplest, which are so familiar to us in everyday life, become strained when we appear behind the footlights before a public of a thousand people. This is why it is necessary to correct ourselves and learn again how to walk, move about, sit or lie down. It is essential to re-educate ourselves to look and see, on the stage, to listen and to hear.

In Stanislavski's method, verisimilitude is inside-out. What the audience sees as authenticity comes from the performer's authentic connection to her inner life. The opposite can also be true: If the audience doesn't see it, the actor must not feel it.

This sort of Stanislavski critique is weirdly common among journalists who assume that when a candidate has trouble connecting with audiences, it is not a sign that they are, say, uncomfortably shy or naturally reserved. It is, rather, a deeper failure on the part of the candidate's character—a failure to find psycho-physical unity with the part we've all decided the candidate should play before the footlights of a national campaign.

To state the obvious: This is a really dumb way to try to cover elections. Theater-critic journalism is certainly not as substantive as policy analysis. It's also neither as meaty as terrific behind-the-scenes reporting, nor as harmless as anodyne horse-race coverage. It is, rather, personal opinion about a candidate's authenticity masquerading as nonpartisan analysis of their ability to connect with voters, often detached from any analysis of whether the candidate is really connecting with voters. It is a popular critic, in the orchestra section, writing in the first-person plural.

It's one thing to determine a candidate's moral fiber by, let's just say, examining their donations and electronic communications history. It's another to assess a candidate's theatrical fluency (e.g. that Clinton stands too stiffly, opens her eyes too widely, and telegraphs her target demographic too directly) and conclude that they are behaving in such a way that most people will probably like, or not. This, like actual theater criticism, can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which positive reviews prime audiences to think positively. In the political science literature, it's called "the echo chamber," in which journalists, in an attempt to reflect or anticipate candidates's popular appeal, praise their "style," regardless of their policies, entrenching the idea that the best actors will make the best candidates (and, by extension, the best presidents).