Presidential beyond words

“Obama’s weaknesses on full display in debate”; “Obama admits debate performance a flop”; “In debate style and body language, Romney trumps Obama”. These have been the sort of remarks making headlines since the first of the three United States presidential debates in the run-up to the vote between Democratic incumbent, President Barack Obama, and Republican candidate Governor Mitt Romney. As expected, the debate has been extensively analyzed in the hopes of predicting who might become the next American president. What was especially striking about the media coverage this time was the excessive attention given to the candidates’ physical language, across both serious and comedic media, which seems to have played a major role in their proclamation of the first debate’s winner. While the analysis of body language might seem trivial to many, becoming the preferred subject of comedy and spoof shows, some studies have shown that only 7 percent of