First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

                Barack Obama didn’t have to win last night’s debate.  In fact, he could have afforded to lose it outright without doing serious harm to his chances in November.  Absent some earth-shattering mistake, the only debate that really matters in any given election cycle is the first one, and even there, it’s the theatrics rather than the substance that counts.  Does the perceived challenger (the younger, less-experienced candidate, say, or the representative of the party out of power) look more or less equal to his opponent?  Can one envision him as president?  If after the first debate the answers to those questions are affirmative, what the two candidates have said about policy and how they behave in subsequent debates won’t make much difference.   The image has been fixed.  To my eye, as reported in this space a fortnight ago, the first debate was a draw, but the public perceived Obama to have been the victor.   Whatever happened in the debates remaining was unlikely to affect the dynamics of the race significantly.

                That said, I still believe last night’s debate was close to a rout.  Obama didn’t need a victory, but he got a big one.  This was partly a result of his simply being the superior debater and the better candidate.  His answers were crisper and more cogent, his policies more realistic and thought-through, his mastery of the format — widely but foolishly predicted to play to John McCain’s forehand — overwhelming.  And in any case, his forensic burden was lighter, since he isn’t the nominee of the party that gave us George W. Bush and the concomitant catastrophe of the last eight years.  McCain has been forced into verbal jujitsu since before the campaign began, simultaneously defending his party’s policies and traditions while attacking its most prominent representative, and he hasn’t handled the challenge with agility.  It may be a challenge that defies agility.

                But McCain made matters worse for himself.  By initiating a really ugly advertising campaign against Obama in the week or so preceding the debate, and unleashing his disaster of a running mate in full demagogic McCarthyite fury, and promising his most rabid supporters that in this debate he would be “taking the gloves off,” he established an atmosphere and a set of expectations that could not, willy-nilly, work in his favour.  If he had indeed assailed Obama about his casual acquaintanceship with former radical William Ayers, or his former minister Jeremiah Wright, or any of the other ginned-up, racially-coded non-issues the McCain campaign has been furiously purveying in recent days, he would have alienated every independent voter watching.  And in the process he would have invited a potentially devastating counterattack he had every reason to know had been prepared for just such an eventuality.  But having introduced those kinds of attack into the public dialogue, and having promised supporters more of the same in a face-to-face setting, his decision not to follow through looked pusillanimous.  This was a quandary of his own making, and was only the latest in a series of other ill-considered tactical gambits that have turned around and bitten him on the ass.  Its inherent nastiness, along with its almost perverse obtuseness, makes it impossible to feel much sympathy;  McCain looks hapless, but he deserves to look hapless.

                All one can say in his defense is that he knew he was losing the election and decided his only hope lay in a reckless gamble.  But my saying something in his defense isn’t the same as suggesting he’s defensible;  he has, in the last week or two, succeeded in poisoning public discourse in a way that even political incendiaries Lee Atwater and Karl Rove never attempted.  And in a way that, had it worked, would have poisoned racial relations and much else in this country for years.  Fortunately, it has looked and smelled as desperate as it actually is, and seems, at least up to the time of this writing, to have achieved no resonance.  His unwillingness to follow through along these lines at the debate underlines its failure to persuade anyone other than those already persuaded, those troglodytes shouting for blood in Pensacola, Florida and Southern California.

                There may be a few more ugly arrows in McCain’s quiver, but their number must be dwindling, and the prevailing conditions do not favour their efficacy.  October, I think, will be a very long and frustrating month for John McCain.  And therefore, alas, also for the country he will not, ultimately, be governing.

                In closing, I want to say a word about one of Obama’s secret weapons, to wit, his smile.  It isn’t merely that it’s an extremely winning smile;  most politicians (although not, as it happens, John McCain) develop those.  But as evidenced during the debate, it’s the sort of smile I haven’t seen on an American presidential candidate since John Kennedy, a smile almost subversive that registers almost subliminally.  (You can probably find a few old examples on Youtube.com if you look for clips from JFK’s 1960 debates with Nixon.)  In both cases, it’s a smile flashed, with every appearance of spontaneity, when the candidate’s opponent is speaking.  A smile of serene self-confidence, an ironic but gleeful smile that both acknowledges the absurdity of the blather the political game imposes on its practitioners and simultaneously revels in it.  It’s a very private smile of very private amusement that nevertheless manages to invite the rest of us in to enjoy the whole crazy spectacle.

       This will be my final post, and it will, of necessity, be short, since I have to leave for the airport soon.

        My wife and I watched Obama’s acceptance speech in Al Gore’s sky box.  The atmosphere, like the atmosphere in the other sky boxes Laura and I visited last night, was festive and congenial.  Nevertheless, one had to wonder what Gore was thinking and feeling.  His own speech had I thought, been excellent — it was one of the most serious and principled of the convention — and the love that welled up in that mammoth crowd (said to be 84,000 strong) when he made his entrance, and the approval that greeted his every salient point, must have been gratifying to him.  But bitter-sweet as well.  History has been capricious and sometimes downright nasty to Al Gore.  However, although the Democratic Party can be tough on its also-rans, subjecting them to scorn and recrimination, Al Gore, after a season in Purgatory, has seen his reputation redeemed.  He seemed to be a better speaker, too, partly, no doubt, as at the last convention, because he was forced to go faster than usual by the short amount of time he had been allotted.  As my friend Chris Caldwell observed in 2004, Gore “had to speak at the speed of his intelligence.”  Which meant stepping on applause lines time after time, but also avoiding the syrupy sanctimoniousness that sometimes mars his standard speaking style.

       Obama’s speech ws a triumph.  It wasn’t as eloquent or as elevated as the one he delivered in Boston four years ago, the one that thrust him onto the world’s stage.  This one had a different purpose, setting out to say three simple things:  1) I’m like you, I’ve had the same problems you’ve had, I know what you’re going through;  2) Despite my elegant appearance and demeanour, I’m one tough son of a bitch, and if John McCain doesn’t know that yet, he will before this campaign is over;  and 3) I may be untraditional, but a president can look like me, and I can look and feel just like a president.  And he conveyed all three things magnificently.  I don’t imagine there’s much happiness in Republican circles this morning.  Whatever displays of bravado they’ve been managing for the benefit of the press and their own supporters, they know there’s only one way for them to beat this guy, and win or lose, it won’t be pretty.

       Because at this stage, there’s only one genuinely unresolved issue in the campaign.  And that issue is race.  The country despises Bush, both the man and his policies.  Over the last two years, polling results consistently confirm this.  The Democrats enjoy a large majority in terms of public support.  Obama’s gifts are manifest, his youth and energy compelling, his rise phenomenal.  Meanwhile, John McCain has run a campaign that has bordered on the incompetent, has policy prescriptions that veer toward the incoherent, and seems to have aged visibly and alarmingly in the eight years since his gallant first campaign for the presidency.  If Obama were a white man — a white southern governor, say — this contest would already be over.  So the only question remaining is whether Americans are ready to make what Norman Mailer would have called an existential choice, to risk an outcome without precedent that will redefine the country and the world.  I don’t know the answer.  But I do know that if we wake up on 5 November to learn that John McCain is the president-elect, the depression that follows will be abiding;  something noble and courageous and large-spirited in the United States will be gone, hopelessly lost for a generation.

Okay, here’s the part where I eat crow.  Hillary gave the best speech I’ve ever seen her give, and her support for Obama seemed unequivocal.  She sounded all the notes she needed to sound, and she had total command of the audience.  Whether this will have any effect on her most rabid supporters I don’t know, but if they remain intransigent, no one can say this speech gave them any encouragement.

At every political convention I’ve covered, I‘ve begun by promising myself not to write about the miserable hassles involved in securing press credentials.  I’ve never succeeded.  Sooner or later, my good intentions have given way to sustained whining. In print. This time, though, I’m determined to come as close to a British-style stiff upper lip as is within my power, contenting myself with a simple… Don’t get me started.

This morning, my wife and I went to the convention hall early.  She had a rehearsal session scheduled for a little colloquy in which she will be participating this evening, with Sherrod Brown, a rising-star freshman senator from Ohio, and a small number of economic, healthcare, and education experts.  The main purpose of the little colloquy was for the participants to say, in a variety of ways, Obama is good and McCain is bad, and the session director kept reminding them that this was their remit.  Occasionally, if one or the other of them said Obama is good but neglected to add that McCain also happens to be bad, the director was quick to point out this little lapse.  They all quickly got into the groove.  But I don’t mention this rehearsal because it was anything to write home about.  The thing itself was frankly a yawn (please don’t tell Laura I said so).  What I mostly managed to take away from it is: Obama good, McCain bad.

But something interesting happened before the rehearsal began.  Laura and I were sitting in the green room, waiting for the other participants to arrive (a sign of how tight the security is here at the hall: The session ended up being delayed more than half an hour because Senator Brown and his wife were being frisked and examined by the police outside the hall;  I suppose you never can tell which member of the US Senate is a crazed terrorist in Solon’s clothing), minding our own business, when a rather handsome black woman of a certain age with two very attractive little girls entered the green room. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” the woman said with a little laugh.  “I just follow orders.”  And then she introduced herself:  “Hi, I’m Marian Robinson.”  The name rang a bell, but it was the face that clinched it:  she looked absolutely identical to her daughter, Michelle Obama.  This was the potential future first mother-in-law, shepherding her two grandchildren around the Denver convention centre.  For the record, I saw no sign of any special protection around these three precious entities;  they were ushered in by some sort of minder, a pleasant young woman who, believe me, was packing no heat, and they then sat and chatted with us, good-naturedly and unaffectedly.  Mrs Robinson herself was as gracious and unprepossessing as can be—we laughed about the absurd anonymity and apparent arbitrariness of convention rules and directives—and the kids were sweet and well behaved.

Continue reading ‘Denver dispatches - Erik Tarloff - Monday 25th August’