As the primary season continues to unspool, two mysteries are on daily display. First, in a calling requiring interpersonal, social, communication skills, why do so many candidates seem incapable of standing up in front of people and talking to them? Second, why is the press incapable of asking questions that will elicit illuminating answers?

Some candidates are good one on one, but terrible in front of a crowd. Some the reverse. Some talk too much, others too little. Some adopt a public face that seems more like a mask, others can seem lifelike. And as Sam Goldwyn said long ago, sincerity is the most important thing. If you can fake that you’re golden.

Since speaking in public is essential to getting electing and persuading people to follow your lead, you’d think candidates would try to master the persuasive arts and especially learn to come across well on TV. After all, it is almost 100 years since campaigns began to use microphones, then radio, then television. Is it too much to expect candidates to be able to communicate in person or on the electronic media, not through the artifice of ads.

John Kennedy was a hit not because of his accomplishments or policies or even his glamor, though that never hurts, but because he was easy in his skin, fluent, articulate, witty, confident and persuasive. Lyndon Johnson was not. He belonged to the earlier era of the phony oratorical manner, and the bigger the stage the phonier that gets. The bombast annoying, the gestures too big, the style far from normal, everyday speech.

Nixon famously dismissed TV as a gimmick, even after his glowering appearance on it helped lose him the presidency in 1960. Even his boss, Ike, had a TV coach and was smart enough to follow his advice. In 1968, Roger Ailes had the temerity to tell Nixon he was wrong and was hired to turn Nixon into an adequate, less off-putting TV performer.

It is amazing that it took this long for the pols to begin to get the message. With examples like Roosevelt’s fireside chats and Churchill’s wartime broadcasts before them, you’d think that every politician would see it was essential to learn to connect over the air, but many still haven’t. Jeb Bush in common with his father and brother is remarkably inarticulate, often groping for words as if English is not his native tongue. A third brother had serious learning disabilities, and hearing the Bush men speak you often wonder if there isn’t a strain of dyslexia behind their oratorical incompetence.

Then there is the issue of artificiality. Gary Giddins in his essential biography of Bing Crosby says that the singer realized around 1930 that the microphone was “a new instrument.” And when he did, “the tradition of vocal shouting receded into instant prehistory… A new and more intimate kind of singing for larger audiences was made possible.”

To one extent or another Trump, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton act as if they haven’t heard this news. Yes, they are speaking in big rooms to lots of cheering people, but they are amplified and that innovation should have long ago spelled the demise of bombastic, hectoring, reach-for-the-rafters speechifying. Yet they all tend to speak loudly, and in one monotonous vocal range and tone.

This is especially befuddling in the case Hillary since she is married to one of the great practitioners of intimate interaction with crowds. The contrast was on display recently when Bill introduced her to an auditorium full of people. You could see him connecting with them, leaning in, perfectly at ease, confiding, joshing, sharing ideas and feelings, inviting agreement. Then Hillary came on and began to speak as from a great distance in the canned locutions of the speechwriter and in a stentorian voice in which loud means, “pay attention” and louder means “no, really I mean it. You must pay attention.”

Those who know her personally suggest she can be warm, able to establish rapport, to show interest, to act human, but give her a microphone and a dais and she speaks as if in all capital letters, in a voice worthy of Ethel Merman, as if to deaf or stupid people. S-p-e-l-l-i-n-g I-t O-u-t. IF YOU WORK FOR ME, I WILL WORK FOR YOU. This is befuddling behavior.

The answer to the second question is the flip side of this coin and also has to do with technology. Television demands that reporters jab a microphone and shove a camera into a candidate’s face and get an instant ten-second response to a trivial and obvious question. Seeking sound bites, they train candidates to deliver sound bites. Long is bad, short is good. Complicated is bad, simple is good.

Even in sit-down interviews the time allotted is usually ten minutes or less, so Rubio-like candidates memorize rote answers and deliver them in a slick, robotically unchanging way. “Let’s dispense once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” And apparently no need for the candidate to know what he’s doing, to think on his feet or enter into a give and take.

By contrast when the cameras are off, if a candidate sits with a print reporter or on a radio talk show or with an editorial board for an hour, there is at least a chance that a little rapport can be established, the candidate can run through his patter, but then begin to answer a few follow-up questions. Like, how would that work? How much would it cost? Where would the money come from to pay for it? You say you want to do A, but some people think B would work better. What’s so good about A? What’s wrong with B?

In such nuts-and-bolts discussions, the candidate may not spill his guts or make news, but he just might reveal if he knows what he’s talking about, how his mind works, whether he’s thought about the issues or is just a wind-up doll, spouting talking points that pollsters have tested and found popular with an important demographic.

So why doesn’t TV do any real probing of the candidates’ minds and ideas and intentions? Because there isn’t time before the next commercial. Because the viewers might get bored and change the channel. And because TV news isn’t any more interested in issues than the candidates. Both the media and the pols are primarily interested in the horserace. Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s trending? Who cares where they’d take the country or what it would cost?

It’s why Trump and TV are made for each other. Sound and fury, signifying ratings.