So I just finished watching the first 65 minutes or so of the debate, and here are my thoughts,
1. This was the character Romney should have been playing all along – Romney at his best is a less affable and empathic (but more personally decent) Bill Clinton. A big part of Clinton’s appeal is his ability to talk policy in ways that relate to people’s lives. Romney is the guy who studies hard, knows his facts, and is focused on results. So when Romney shows that he is using his big brain and formidable work ethic to explain policies that benefit the public, he comes off as reassuring and somewhat likeable. When Romney tries to become likeable by avoiding policy issues, he comes across as phony and condescending. The smart, policy-focused Romney is the most likeable Romney that is going to come across on television. Hopefully that lesson has sunk in. The more Romney talks about the issues, the better off he is.
2. The big lesson of this cycle’s debates: Stop underestimating the intelligence of the American public – Looking at the post-debate polls, the Romney that showed up at the debate made a much better impression than the “humanized” Romney of the Republican convention. Why did they like yesterday’s Romney? Probably for the same reason Republican primary voters ultimately liked Romney’s primary debate performances more than Michelle Bachmann’s and Herman Cain’s. The lesson of this debating season is that if you have a plausible explanation for our circumstances, have proposals that connect to people’s lives, and can defend your proposals, people tend to like it. Having substance and making an effort to communicate that substance works a lot better than Cain’s 9-9-9, or Gingrich’s moon colonies, or Romney’s convention story about roses or Obama’s trying to skate through yesterday’s debate on smugness. I’m not saying that the American public is some kind of Brookings Institution seminar audience. Obama and Romney would both probably have gotten failing graded from such a crowd. I am saying that the public is smarter and more interested in the candidates showing issue mastery than the campaigns seem to think. It’s not for nothing that the two best received remarks of the general election season have been Bill Clinton’s Democratic convention speech and Romney debate performance.
3. The prevent defense is still for losers – Obama wanted the debate to be a nonevent. He spent the first part of the debate trying to make the debate a low key affair of two guys with Obama having slightly better ideas. The result that Obama was just incredibly boring for the first fifteen minutes or so. I would hear two sentences of Obama and if I didn’t force myself to focus, I started hearing Charlie Brown’s teacher. I think that may have been partly intentional on Obama’s part. The problem was that Romney didn’t play along and by the time Obama realized Romney was getting in some hits, much of the damage was done. I think Obama wishes he had tried to turn it into a slugfest.
4. Time – I haven’t seem all of the debate but Obama seems to be doing more of the talking and Jim Lehrer is forever trying to shut Romney up.
5. Finally a mention Of IPAB by Romney – I thought Romney did very well on Medicare, but he left a few points on the field in regard to Obama’s centralized rationing board. It wasn’t totally clear that Romney is for a defined Medicare benefit to go along with competitive bidding.
6. Nobody is rope-a-doping anybody – Romney didn’t give a bad convention speech and have a lousy September in order to lull Obama into a false sense of security. Romney just picked a bad strategy for a while. Obama didn’t look bad yesterday as part of master plan to destroy Romney in later debates. He just ran into a better opponent than he expected and running out the clock was the wrong answer on that night. What both of them are doing is very hard.
October 5th, 2012 | 5:55 am
1) Maybe
2) Maybe
3) Maybe
4) Seemed about equal, they both ran over Jim Lehrer. Obama certainly lost and you know this when the key policy based rhetorical defense on the left is the role of the “moderator”/”mediator”. In fact this takes it completly out of the realm of copyright, and sort of elevates it in importance to the realm of a mediated settlement/negotiation. The fact that some serious professionals who make relatively big money are so concerned with the nudge factors in choosing a moderator+ moderator/philosophy/policy says something about the political economy of ADR.
6) Obama was unprepared, but he might as well continue to be unprepared, and simply argue that he is busy working, and can’t devote himself to the minutia of speechcraft and authorship. It is hard work, and one might expect when the issue isn’t competence and intelligence that the one with the most time to prepare and craft wins. At this point Obama might as well just “lose” the second debate as well, because it isn’t clear that 3 is true. Or if 3 is true, then there are issues of relevance or materiality, and it would be easy for Obama to simply write off Romney’s performances as a string of pyrrhic victories. Prevent defense up by 1O might mean you only win by 3 in which case it does fail to prevent the TD.
7) I am not 100% sure on the rope-a-dope. I suppose you mean in the context of debate performance being material, in which case I agree. But the inevitability of Obama, plus the fact that a lot of progressives are somewhat on the fence or dissapointed…I think Obama wants to inject a sense of relevancy/urgency, and prevent voter complancency…and he can do this by loosing the debates. It wouldn’t change what John Presnal probably rightfully thinks in terms of voters already being decided by “history”…but sometimes you have to be trending against “history” to awaken it. So to stimulate the on the fence progressives you might have to give them the fear that Romney could win… and what better way than rhetorical let down. In any case Obama is just deflating by contrast his Intellectual property (servicemark/history…copyright/rhetoric) heavy 2008. Obama’s behavior in the debate is potentially signaling that he thinks the undecided are unlikely/unsure Obama voters he can motivate to the polls by handing Romney “rhetorical” momentum. While measuring intelligence or at least aptitude on a standardized test is a policy question of its own, there is no definative answer on the undecideds, or those who might be swayed by debates. You could very much be preaching to the choir. In fact the audience for a political debate could be Brookings Institution seminar audience, or other media (like college professors or lawyers). The audience could very easily be more sophisticated than the audience at large. The funny question is: What happens when the “objective” debate judges decide that Romney won the debate on objective criteria and take offense at Obama’s lack of seriousness, or his rendering of the importance of that proffesional judgement moot or obsolete as to functionality and relevance?
Lets say you lean Obama, but you are professionally vested in the importance of what I denigrate broadly as “copyright”. (say you are a debate coach)…do you say, Romney has respected my “culture” and my profession, while Obama has brought dishonor?
What if the “undecideds” or the independents are just a bunch of sophisticated “micro”-cultures/trends, more vested in certain broad forms and structures of intellectual property…commited to the pagentry/business of the whole thing so to speak? What if the Obama bubble got so big in 2008, because we had a lousy economy, and everyone wanted a narrative to prop up narratives, copyright and trademark for copyright and trademark sake. History for the sake of the history major? You bother actually investing/wasting time in what constitutes objective criteria of debate performance… you sort of have to defend that “trademark” (the brand of the good, the good being the objective methodology)…even if it means voteing for Romney over Obama.
October 5th, 2012 | 8:01 am
In re #4:
Curiously, Lehrer seemed to be doing that. As it turns out, President Obama had a 4-minute advantage at the end of the debate.
See, e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/03/politics/debate-main/index.html:
“Moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS, at times, tried without success to keep the candidates within time limits for responses, especially Obama, who ended up speaking four minutes longer than Romney.”
October 5th, 2012 | 9:31 am
Unquestionably, Obama did not do well, and Romney did quite well. Congratulations to him and to you.
But, so far, the fundamentals have remained the same: If Romney wins ALL the states that are currently the softest, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, he will still fall 5 EV short of an electoral victory. With all this, Romney has to win both Nevada and New Hampshire to win. Of these, he is leading only in North Carolina.
This translates into a popular vote shift of about 5-6% for a win. Why so high? Because a 2% shift in New York, California, or Illinois will not help him in the least.
I mentioned that by Thursday we would know who won this week’s news cycle and it clearly was Romney. Monday should tell us what % of popular vote shift he has gained. He needs a shift of 1.5% to stay level. Anything less and he has lost ground.
He has three more news cycles to go.
October 5th, 2012 | 9:49 am
My mistake: He has four more news cycles to go, and his magic popular vote % is 1.2%.
October 5th, 2012 | 10:10 am
Pete, loved the line about Charlie Brown’s teacher.
You’re quite reasonable about this. Want a wilder theory?
There’s something about the man’s discourse that dissolves into mush once the mind has been subjected to it too many times. It takes liberal minds, potemkin moderate minds, and real moderate minds longer than conservative minds, but eventually for everyone, Obama winds up sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Even the lies and the arrogance no longer tickle the passions of the hearer, so par for the course they become. An irreversible process.
October 5th, 2012 | 11:39 am
UPDATE: Good news for Mitt. He has pushed back hard in Virginia, picked up 2.5%’, and reduced his following margin to 3.7%. This divides into four cycles as .93% to stay level. Very good news indeed.
October 5th, 2012 | 8:39 pm
Joseph, I’m not so worried about the swing state polls. If Romney’s message resonates to the point where he pulls out a 1%-2% popular vote win, I’ll take my chances with the electoral vote. If I’m wrong I’m wrong.
But if three years ago you had told me that the October unemployment rate would be in the high 7s and (slowly) dropping, that growth would be very slow but positive, and that gas would be between three and four dollars, I would have said I projected a narrow Obama win unless the Republican candidate was really well suited to the moment (I think Bob McDonnell, Mitch Daniels and Bobby Jindal would have been in slightly different ways. Debate aside, I still don’t think Romney is the guy. It isn’t really a prediction, just a best guess that I hope is wrong.
Carl, with me the effect comes and goes. The first twenty minutes were brutal. But they were probably intended to be. He was trying to get the audience not to listen. But when he was talking Medicare and health care policy he was a lot easier to listen to. His answers could have been tighter and, if you listen closely there sounds like an implied argument for Soviet agriculture, he made a case for the centralized finance of health care and an argument against the Ryan-Wyden version of premium support.
October 6th, 2012 | 4:16 am
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