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.
