Watching the presidential candidates debate last night, I found myself wondering whether anyone would object if the baseball scores were posted in a slow crawl across the bottom of the screen. Maybe that is because the Twins, in first place by a half game with three to play, were in action against the Kansas City Royals around four miles north of our TV. Maybe, too, it was because the debate was kind of slow and disappointing for those of us hoping for some pyrotechnical knife-thrusting from Barack Obama. "When you got the other guy down, put the fork in," advised the football coach at Columbia Heights High School. Obama did not, and, of the reactions to the debate that I've read online this morning, the one that comes closest to mine is from Thomas Schaller, who at Salon's War Room writes:
What I do know is that Obama did not come up with the caustic, repeatable sound bite. Can somebody explain to me why Obama didn't interrupt just once to say, "You know, Senator McCain keeps saying I don't understand this or that, but on the biggest foreign policy and military decision of the past 40 years -- the Iraq invasion -- the senator got it wrong. Repeat: Wrong. So he ought to save all his condescending lectures about who understands what, because he didn't understand what was at stake in Iraq, and that misunderstanding cost us 4,000 lives and a trillion dollars."
The rhetorical request for an explanation is supplied by James Fallows:
Obama would have pleased his base better if he had fought back more harshly in those 90 minutes -- cutting McCain off, delivering a similarly harsh closing judgment, using comparably hostile body language, and in general acting more like a combative House of Commons debater. Those would have been effective tactics minute by minute.
But Obama either figured out, or instinctively understood, that the real battle was to make himself seem comfortable, reasonable, responsible, well-versed, and in all ways "safe" and non-outsiderish to the audience just making up its mind about him. (And yes, of course, his being a young black man challenging an older white man complicated everything he did and said, which is why his most wittily aggressive debate performance was against another black man, Alan Keyes, in his 2004 Senate race.) The evidence of the polls suggests that he achieved exactly this strategic goal. He was the more "likeable," the more knowledgeable, the more temperate, etc.
Schaller and I are perhaps hotheads, like McCain. Fallows is cool as Obama. Here's hoping he's right.
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