Debate I

McCain, on points

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Election2008/debate1.htm
09/25/08

The debate went off after all, and it was probably the best presidential debate we’ve seen since Nixon /Kennedy. For one thing, there were follow-up questions from a competent moderator. Anyone who remembers Charlie Gibson’s poor job of moderating the second debate between Putsch and John Kerry will recognize that a good moderator is essential to a good debate. Lehrer is a good moderator.

Second, the two men were allowed – indeed, encouraged – to speak directly to one another. They both had trouble with that in the first half hour, something I attribute to the rules of debate in Congress, where debaters address the chair or the body, and not each other. To a degree, both were using material from their stump speeches, which also doesn’t involve direct interaction with the other. Both managed it sporadically as the debate continued.

Third, for the first time in almost 12 years, the Republican candidate wasn’t a complete moron. Putsch was, is, and always will be an idiot. Al Gore, confronted with a type of idiocy he probably hadn’t seen since grade school, sighed in frustration. Ironically, that cost him, since the spinmeisters were able to paint him as an intellectual elitist and Putsch as the type of guy you could have a beer with. (Think about the type of guys you like to have beers with. Would you hire any of them on a bet? Let them take care of your kids? Control your finances? Run your country?). McCain has his flaws, but he is not stupid, and he’s actually good in debate.

So the first debate turned out to be one of the best we’ve seen in a long time, and if I was scoring it on rounds of questions, then I would give it to McCain on points. Part of it was the Ali tactic of rope-a-dope, where he would just lean back against the rope and cover up, and let his candidate throw ineffectual punches. In this case it was a strong reliance on talking points. But where for Putsch, talking points was all he had, McCain used them to rattle Obama and eat up the clock while Obama wore himself down some.

But it wasn’t a strong win for McCain. The debate was mostly about foreign policy, an area where McCain was expected to do well. On the early questions, about how the financial crisis affected America’s global position, I think Obama was a little surprised, and missed several opportunities to slap McCain around on his generally lamentable position on economics.

Neither man screwed up. There were no “Russia does not dominate eastern Europe” moments. There were no points were either man seemed totally flummoxed by a question, or by his opponent’s tactics. McCain talked over Obama, especially toward the end of the debate, but he wasn’t able to bully him into submission.

When McCain doesn’t try to wing it, he’s knowledgeable on foreign affairs. Where I found myself shaking my head and looking disgusted, it wasn’t because he couldn’t identify the leader of Pakistan (as Putsch famously couldn’t) or because he was talking about trouble along the Iraq/Pakistan border, but simply because I disagreed with him. Israel doesn’t need our protection. Iraq is not central to the war on terror. And the surge did n’t solve the problems of violence and insurrection in Iraq.

But fairly often I agreed with him. I look in Putin’s eyes, and I see “KGB” as well. Iran with nukes is a serious hazard to stability and will affect American security. I can’t even fault him for muffing Ahmadinejad’s name – it gave me trouble for quite a while, too, and part of it is that McCain pronounces it with the hard German “ach” sound.

But he spent a lot of time misrepresenting and sometimes flat-out lying about his positions, and some of Obama’s. He kept going back to his talking point that Obama would meet with Ahmindinejad or Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin “without preconditions”, pretending that Obama would meet them with no groundwork, hat in hand. Obama corrected him three times, and when McCain noted that his “good friend” Henry Kissinger would be appalled by such an approach, Obama noted that in fact Kissinger, along with five other former defense and state secretaries, had applauded Obama’s stance and said that it was exactly what America needed to do: start engaging with adversaries and yes, enemies of America rather than engage in the dumb passive-aggressive tactic of not talking to them until they saw the error of their ways. Obama noted that it had backfired with North Korea and Iran, and would backfire even worse against Russia and Venezuela. Whereupon McCain doggedly and mindlessly went back to the same talking point.

It worked for Putsch, but a lot of people have wised up since then, and realized that the ability to parrot carefully scripted memes doesn’t equate to good leadership, or even poor leadership, but rather indicates no ability at all to lead. You might be amused by a parrot that can sing all of the Star Spangled Banner, but would you hire that parrot to run your business?

For McCain, it was a respite in what had basically been a hellish week for him. Sarah Palin’s credibility as a candidate had been rapidly unraveling on him, to the point where she was becoming a drag on the ticket – quite a trick, under the circumstances. And I was interested to note that he mentioned his “vice-presidential candidate, of whom I’m very proud” exactly once, and not by name. Then there was the “suspend the campaign and hie back to Washington” stunt, which would have been masterful had he a) not stiffed David Letterman in his rush to go back and then gone on to do a puffball interview with the toothless Katie Couric, infuriating Dave, who promptly made a fool of McCain, and b) not gone to the very meeting he had called and then sat there mute for forty minutes, apparently with nothing to say, while an agreement that had already been crafted disintegrated.

At that point, anything that didn’t make him look like the biggest ass in Washington would be welcome, and the debate provided that little break.

In leagues like the Canadian Football League, where you have only four teams in the division and want to have more than a two-team playoff, it’s common for the first and second place teams to play two playoff games, home and home. The winner of the two games, should each side win a game, would be determined by the aggregate score. If one team won the first game at home 37-34 (CFL games tend to be high scoring affairs) and then lost in the other team’s stadium the following week by a 40-20 score, than the second team was the winner, 74-57.

McCain won the first debate on points. But it was foreign policy, his home turf. The next two are playing to Obama’s strengths.

McCain is probably wishing he could have run up the score, because he knows it won’t get easier.