When the president was a junior Senator from Illinois with no experience running for the highest office in the world, he emerged from the debates with John McCain and passed the tests and was elected. On these threads one read post after post declaring that Obama was inept and he had thoroughly lost the debates. He was roundly dismissed as being inarticulate. I disagreed profoundly at the time.
The point is not to react according to our own myopia and not to react on the level of information which we accumulate as political junkies and active conservatives and project these assumptions onto the voters who do not share our daily concerns. This is what we typically do when we see President Obama. We know that he's lying and we know that he is playing the rank hypocrite because we are possessed of a background body of knowledge which most voters simply do not share. For example, we knew that Obama was a radical, probably a Marxist. At the time of the presidential and the vice presidential debates, I posted these two replies:
"John McCain lost the debate because Barak Obama did not lose it.
As you pointed out the debate was a draw. The problem with the draw is that McCain had to win or, more precisely, Obama had to lose. Obama had to betray himself as somehow unqualified for the world's greatest job by virtue of experience, character, or radicalism. He need not have failed so miserably as Sarah Palin did in the Katy Couric interview, but it was necessary that somewhere Obama betray a deficiency which validated the rap against him. That simply did not happen.
Therefore I think that McCain's candidacy is in very serious trouble."
After the vice presidential debate, I thought Biden lost because he did not do his job but Sarah Palin advanced her candidacy:
"Senator Biden won on points but lost the debate. This is the mirror image of the McCain/Obama debate in which McCain won on points but lost the debate. This is because the test to be applied in these debates is not who wins on points but who advances his candidacy. Obama clearly advanced his candidacy ahead of McCain because he appeared plausible as a potential president. He passed the test with which he was confronted.
Applying the same standards to Palin is not possible because of her disastrous interviews with Gibson and Katie Couric. Palin's stumbles meant that the bar for her was raised to a higher standard, she had to demonstrate more than plausibility, she had to demonstrate a composure which leads the country comfortable with the idea of her becoming president (not just Vice President). That meant something more than that she could not stumble, she could not wander out of phase, she could not become a deer in the headlights. She achieved that easily and in doing so passed the test that normally would be applied to newcomers. But because of Katie Couric she had to go a step further. She had to affirmatively demonstrate her bona fides, her inner qualities. But merely evading the negative was not enough, she had to take the country to school and demonstrate that she could perform under pressure. She also passed this test.
The question is how far did she advance the candidacy? The answer is, not enough.
The McCain/Palin ticket is in serious trouble. It can only be remedied by destroying Barak Obama as a candidate whom the people can trust. That was not accomplished tonight, it was not even attempted. There was no attempt, for example, to pin the Obama to the subprime catastrophe through Acorn, through Franklin Raines, through Johnson, through his Democrat cronies in the Senate, or through his receipt of direct contributions from Fannie Mae. It is my guess that there are two possible reasons for this: 1) John McCain's epiphany in the Hanoi Hilton that he was "no longer his own man of the country's" was very real and it means to him that he would rather lose an election than sabotage a bailout package which he believes might save the country from ruin. 2) internal polling and focus group investigation has convinced the McCain camp that the more they engage in the blame game, the more they become attached to the Bush administration and that would be the death knell of the candidacy. In my opinion, there is no possibility that McCain does not see the utility of such an attack. Either he shrinks from its or he believes it simply will not work.
I cannot say that he is wrong but I can say that he has no other choice.
Since this is the issue which obviously will decide this election, McCain's fastidiousness is inexplicable. I say again, unless Barak Obama is destroyed as someone we can trust, he will win the election.Obama's radicalism must be demonstrated and it must be connected to the financial crisis. He must be shown to have been corrupt or at least corruptly connected with the Democrats at fault and he must be shown by virtue of his associations and his radicalism to be too dangerous to be the man to lead his out of this mess.
It is anemic to argue taxes. The country believes the nation is falling off a cliff and they want a lifeline. Taxes are important only as a symbol of what a socialist/ statist will do to the economy-we are past quadrennial Republican complaints about taxes-the people want to trust somebody to lead them out. McCain can plausibly claim to be that man because of his integrity but he must also disqualify Obama as too risky and untrustworthy.
Every day the time grow shorter and shorter and any attempt to invoke this strategy will look more and more desperate. There is only one thing to do and that is to go after Obama now as a very dangerous radical soiled by corrupt and dangerous associations which utterly disqualify him from any national position of trust.
John McCain, you have had the courage to throw the Hail Mary pass twice before. You are going into the fourth quarter, you are losing and you are going to lose, throw the damn ball!"
In judging how the president fared as he is being viewed on MSNBC and C-SPAN, we must understand the context, the dynamic which informs the reactions of America's voters. Obama is no longer the Messiah, he is now understood to be a promise breaker, a hypocrite, and untruthful. He is believed to be arrogant, dogmatic, and certainly ideological. These views which are now rather commonly held and are not exclusive to FReepers as they were at the time of the debates. Obama has lost the advantage of his race which gave him immunity from criticism. The tide has changed and the dynamic has reversed, the president is now on the defensive and his job is to show that he is not any of the things catalogued in this paragraph.
Unfortunately, the Republicans just provided him a forum in which he did just that. The public will not see him as petulance they will see him as courageous for going into the enemy camp alone. They will see him struggling to achieve bipartisanship-the holy growl of the independence who expect all politicians to solve their problems while singing kumbaya. They will see him redeemed from the arrogant, dogmatic, ideologue who is making their life worse and not better.
By way of another example, we FReepers persist in the self-delusion that Obama cannot speak without Teleprompter. I don't know where this silly Miss-perception came from but it is time for us to abandon it entirely because it simply is not credible and makes every legitimate criticism of Obama ring hollow. Obama went before the Republicans have held his own and there is no denying it. The sooner we understand we are dealing with a very able and wily politician, the sooner we will have a chance of beating him in 2012. Self-deception is the surest way to defeat.
Make no mistake, the president won the debate with the Republicans because in the context he advanced his cause and they did not.
