Watching the debate Friday night was like watching a sports game. My friends and I sat around the tv, drank beers, talked shit on the other team, and geared up for what we expected to be an intense match-up. Perhaps this analogy does little to detrivialize an American election tradition that has become increasingly aware of its audience's short attention spans; the verbose and eloquent exchange of complex ideas has been traded in for snide comments and zing moments. But these debates aren't about trading ideas for the good of furthering the conversation regarding the problems that face our society, they are about sticking to your team's playbook, seeing who can get the other team to make a fumble, who can seem tougher and deliver more punches, who can score more points not with the strength of their arguments, but with the confidence with which the argument is delivered.
The difference on Friday was that there wasn't an objective or clear way to keep score. That leaves audiences at home deciding for themselves who won and then checking their scorecard against those of the pundits the next day. Perhaps being trained in the Philadelphia sports school of thought, I tend to be slightly pessimistic about my team's performance. I thought, after watching on Friday, that McCain had won. I adamently disagreed with everything he said. But I was afraid that others would view his constant assertion that "Senator Obama just doesn't understand" as truth instead of an attempt to feed into his campaign's narrative that Obama is naive and inexperienced. I thought Obama's refusal to press into McCain about misrepresentations about Obama's record would paint Obama as weak and unconfident in his own ideas.
According to polls, pundits, and other politicos, however, I underestimated my own team.
I think the most telling of all the debate analysis is the instant poll taken by MediaCurves.com. In each subset, based on topic, Republicans always thought McCain was stronger and Democrats always thought Obama was stronger. This isn't a surprise, but it says something important and very logical on a basic level about the debates: they actually matter very little. At this point, voters have already picked their teams for the most part. They don't watch the debate to give the candidates one last look before they cast their votes, they watch the debate to affirm what they already believe. The strategies of each campaign are now: 1) don't make any catastrophic mistakes, 2) hope your opponent makes a catastrophic mistake, and 3) get out as many of your team's voters as you can on Election Day. Again, this is by no means a novel idea or a genius observation on my part. I just find it fascinating that these elections get wrapped up in complex strategies and momentum and media soundbytes that we forget how basic the whole thing really is: getting more votes than the other team.
There are a lot of things I could expand upon here. But I will say one last thing. If you look at the indepedents polled in the MediaCurves, in each topic they thought that Obama won. Now, I don't really believe that there are, at this point, any true independent voters; the ideologies of both candidates are just too different to be on the fence. Of course there are completely uneducated voters who are voting based on cosmetic issues--which, I guess could be a lot of folks--but I still believe that each one of them deep down know exactly who they are voting for. Either they want to be considered "mavericks" in their own rights by not chosing a candidate, or they are embarrassed for one reason or another to admit who they are voting for. But the swing of independent voters towards Obama means really good things for him. Let's just hope that they do indeed cast their votes and, furthermore, vote for the Blue Team.
The difference on Friday was that there wasn't an objective or clear way to keep score. That leaves audiences at home deciding for themselves who won and then checking their scorecard against those of the pundits the next day. Perhaps being trained in the Philadelphia sports school of thought, I tend to be slightly pessimistic about my team's performance. I thought, after watching on Friday, that McCain had won. I adamently disagreed with everything he said. But I was afraid that others would view his constant assertion that "Senator Obama just doesn't understand" as truth instead of an attempt to feed into his campaign's narrative that Obama is naive and inexperienced. I thought Obama's refusal to press into McCain about misrepresentations about Obama's record would paint Obama as weak and unconfident in his own ideas.
According to polls, pundits, and other politicos, however, I underestimated my own team.
I think the most telling of all the debate analysis is the instant poll taken by MediaCurves.com. In each subset, based on topic, Republicans always thought McCain was stronger and Democrats always thought Obama was stronger. This isn't a surprise, but it says something important and very logical on a basic level about the debates: they actually matter very little. At this point, voters have already picked their teams for the most part. They don't watch the debate to give the candidates one last look before they cast their votes, they watch the debate to affirm what they already believe. The strategies of each campaign are now: 1) don't make any catastrophic mistakes, 2) hope your opponent makes a catastrophic mistake, and 3) get out as many of your team's voters as you can on Election Day. Again, this is by no means a novel idea or a genius observation on my part. I just find it fascinating that these elections get wrapped up in complex strategies and momentum and media soundbytes that we forget how basic the whole thing really is: getting more votes than the other team.
There are a lot of things I could expand upon here. But I will say one last thing. If you look at the indepedents polled in the MediaCurves, in each topic they thought that Obama won. Now, I don't really believe that there are, at this point, any true independent voters; the ideologies of both candidates are just too different to be on the fence. Of course there are completely uneducated voters who are voting based on cosmetic issues--which, I guess could be a lot of folks--but I still believe that each one of them deep down know exactly who they are voting for. Either they want to be considered "mavericks" in their own rights by not chosing a candidate, or they are embarrassed for one reason or another to admit who they are voting for. But the swing of independent voters towards Obama means really good things for him. Let's just hope that they do indeed cast their votes and, furthermore, vote for the Blue Team.
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