The Seattle Times Company
Four debates, 61,000 words, plenty of spin, sighs, smirks and grimaces, one plumber. What to take away from the three debates between Barack Obama and John McCain and the single faceoff between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin? Five AP reporters help sort it all out.
WASHINGTON -
Four debates, 61,000 words, plenty of spin, sighs, smirks and grimaces, one plumber. What to take away from the three debates between Barack Obama and John McCain and the single faceoff between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin? Five AP reporters help sort it all out.
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ALL ABOUT OBAMA
Forget all the talk about McCain needing to ace the 2008 debate season.
It was never really about him.
The three presidential face-offs – and even the one vice presidential debate – were a referendum on Obama, much like the election itself.
After eight years of President Bush, the country has been craving change, and the political environment has been ripe for a Democratic win.
But the race stayed close for many months, making Democrats nervous and lifting Republican spirits.
Obama’s problem: Voters were skeptical of the political newcomer, who at age 47 is a first-term Illinois senator competing to be the country’s first black president.
His race has presented challenges, though his biggest hurdle in polls has been doubts about his competency.
So, Obama sought to use the debates to make voters comfortable with the idea of him in the White House.
He turned in calm, collected performances – and surveys show he started to erase doubts that held him back earlier in the campaign. His measured and cautious response to the economic crisis also may have helped.
Now, little more than two weeks before the election, he’s broken into the lead in surveys in key states – perhaps for good.
-By Liz Sidoti.
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THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT
In the midst of an economic meltdown and an oh-so serious and negative presidential campaign, the public must have been looking for entertainment value.
What else would explain the 70 million viewers who tuned in to watch the vice presidential debate on Oct. 2. Only Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, in their sole encounter of 1980, attracted a bigger debate audience.
But this was not a public hungry for revelations about the men who would be president or for discourses on policy. This was an audience that had seen the trailers – the befuddled Palin taking questions from Katie Couric, the extravagant Biden scrambling Depression-era history. With that kind of prequel, the main event was sure to be an entertaining diversion.
After all, even Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies set aside an act for comic relief.
But Palin and Biden refused to play the part.
She held her own. He dialed down his bombast. No stumbles, no gaffes. No harm. So concluded the pundits.
Yet, for the audience, something else must have sunk in.
Instant polls called Biden the winner. And by the following week, at least one public opinion survey found that having Biden as Obama’s running mate made people likelier to support the Democrats, while Palin was an albatross on the Republican ticket.
A vice presidential debate that actually mattered?
-By Jim Kuhnhenn
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DROPPIN’ Gs
What do the candidates have against the letter G?
There they were during the four debates, droppin’ their G’s to show they’re just plain folks.
Americans, they said, are “workin’ hard.” They’re “payin’ taxes.” They’re “thinkin’” about how they’ll pay for college.
Gee, Joe Six-Pack would be proud. Or is it Joe the Plumber?
Amazingly, there still are undecided potential voters out there after a campaign that’s nearly two years old. Maybe the candidates’ discourses about health policy or energy conservation will help the ambivalents decide.
Or maybe Joe Six-Pack won’t remember hearin’ anything from the debates except a big ol’ wall of words.
- By Emily Wagster Pettus
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PICK A PERSONA
Debates are a little bit about what the candidates say and a whole lot about HOW they say it. Obama consistently presented himself as calm and reassuring – a sensible message to send to voters who might be wondering whether they can trust this newcomer.
McCain, meanwhile, veered from one approach to another.
Sometimes he sounded like a fire-breathing populist and sometimes like a wise elder statesman. He was both a Washington insider and a beyond-the-beltway reformer. McCain was, by turns, angry, jovial, dismissive, humble, earnest, condescending and more.
It was a complicated mix to offer voters who are trying to figure out who to trust with the nation’s security and economy.
-by Christopher Wills.
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TOWN HALL FAKERY
The “town hall” debate had as much to do with real town halls as the International House of Pancakes has to do with world travel.
The value of a town hall event is seeing how the candidates deal with off-the-wall questions, how they interact with the audience, how the questioners react. What would Obama do if someone directly questioned his Christianity and didn’t believe his answer? Would McCain lose his cool if somebody flatly said he was too old to be president?
But there was no spontaneity in the candidates’ tightly controlled version of a town hall debate. Moderator Tom Brokaw decided which questions would be asked, weeding out anything too off-the-wall. And the audience wasn’t allowed to react or ask follow-up questions. That eliminated the give-and-take that makes a town hall interesting.
At one point, McCain went over to a Navy veteran and shook his hand, saying that he’d learned about leadership from chief petty officers. Whether that was an old McCain line or a truly spontaneous moment, it added a bit of humanity to an otherwise dry debate.
The flat format was the candidates’ own fault – their campaigns had negotiated the ground rules.
-by Christopher Wills.
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BORING. REALLY?
There’s one truly depressing element to presidential debates. And it emerges the minute each debate ends.
Nearly all the commentary on the performances is trapped in a predictable and silly mental straitjacket.
The very first thing we all hear or read is: “Nobody landed a knockout punch.” Later on, the more substantive the debate was, the more issues explored and the more detail the candidates offered about their plans, invariably the more political analysts, TV critics, and even late-night comics will proclaim the event “boring.”
These aren’t boxing matches. Why treat them like they are?
These two politicians are at the pinnacle of American politics. They’ve usually spent a career in public life. They certainly have been tested by the world’s most grueling campaigns, literally studded with debates. What are the chances either one is going to utter some malapropism grievous enough to erase any chance of winning? Blunders like that are going to be as rare as visits by Halley’s Comet.
So stop telling us the obvious, and stop complaining that a truly serious task isn’t as entertaining as a sporting event.
-By Michael J. Sniffen.
