With all three presidential debates in the books, we can fairly ask: what is the role of debates in a modern election? According to the polls, the pundits, and the talk about momentum, the first debate this year was a significant game-changer in favor of Mitt Romney. Why? Was it because President Obama turned in a performance generally regarded as desultory, or was it something else?
I didn’t think the President’s performance during the first debate was as bad as it has been depicted to be. I think, instead, the key point is that people forgot the presidential debates are one of the few political events that are unfiltered. The candidates get a rare opportunity to speak to a national audience, in an unscripted setting, without any yakking by pundits or talking heads. And the national TV audience for the debate, moreover, is interested enough to pick a presidential debate from all other programming options in the modern video world, and therefore probably consists mostly of people who are likely to vote.
In this election, President Obama’s campaign strategy had been to run countless attack ads painting Mitt Romney as a heartless, out-of-touch moneybags who was George W. Bush, Jr. When all you saw was the ads, the strategy worked fine. But Romney’s debate performance was inconsistent with the ads. People watching thought: “Hey, this guy isn’t so bad. He seems pretty reasonable and knowledgeable. Maybe he really can get us out of this mess.” And with that unfiltered realization, millions of dollars in negative ad buy by the President’s campaign went out the window. In fact, Romney’s performance was so contrary to the ads that it probably not only helped Romney but also had a negative impact on the credibility of the Obama campaign commercials going forward.
Another reality is that the after-debate period is longer and more diffuse. People get their sense of how the debates went not just from a few talking heads on the major networks, but from countless TV stations, blogs, comedy shows, Twitter snarf, and social media sites. It may take days, and a few choice “Facebook ads” or Daily Show mocks or heavily reposted blog items, before people settle on what really happened. People in the spin room immediately after the debate no longer control public opinion, if they ever did.
In this election, we now turn to the “ground game” and the contest of which campaign can do a better job of getting their supporters off their duffs and out to the polls. Political operatives, however, will no doubt study the debates in the 2012 campaign and draw some significant conclusions. First, if you are going to go negative on your opponent, make sure you aren’t attacking on character or personality grounds that can be readily disproven in a 90-minute debate; otherwise, you will be flushing your hard-earned campaign contributions down the tubes. Second, don’t forget the after-debate period. As those precious undecided voters are trying to decide who did better, they’ll be looking at a lot of things — and if your candidate came across as disinterested and disengaged, or clown-like, or phony, it will eventually be detected and outed . . . and that will ultimately be the prevailing view of the masses.
There may have been a time when politics “ended at the water’s edge” and the parties spoke with one voice on foreign policy, but that era ended long ago. All of the presidential campaigns I can remember — from the days of Vietnam War protests, to the Iranian hostage crisis, to the more recent debates about how to proceed in Iraq and Afghanistan — have involved some kind of foreign policy issues. Indeed, often one of the presidential debates is devoted exclusively to “foreign policy.” And the Obama Administration obviously feels that foreign policy issues are important; the recent Democratic convention emphasized the killing of Osama bin Laden and sounded the theme that the United States is more secure and respected abroad under the President.
That leaves the issue of 
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I still balk, however, at the sale of product by presidential campaigns. Go to 
Americans vote with their pocketbooks. For all the recent talk about Mitt Romney’s roof transportation of a family pet years ago, President Obama eating dog meat in the distant past, and other silly issues, the economy is what most ordinary people really care about. Contrived issues like prior treatment of dogs have no impact on everyday American life — but a shrinking economy, or a robust one, reaches every kitchen table in every home. We don’t need to be instructed by the media elites about the importance of the economy; we see it every day in unemployed or underemployed friends and struggling local businesses.
I’ll write more about the race as we get closer to the election. For now, I’ll just say that I’m mystified by the tactics of the Brown campaign. I get their e-mails constantly, and they all are about money. How much money Mandel is raising, how much money “special interests” are contributing to support Mandel’s candidacy, how many TV ads have been purchased as a result of the money contributed to the Mandel campaign, and how much money the Brown campaign needs to make up for the cash landslide that is tumbling into Ohio.
During the state fair season, it’s inevitable that politicians will visit the fair. And when they are there, the politicians will want to do whatever it takes to show that they can identify with and understand the concerns of their fellow fairgoers. What better way to communicate that you aren’t some ivory tower, out-of-touch, upper-class twit than by eating some fair food along with the rest of the dusty masses? And, of course, the corn dog is the most basic fair food item of all.
As a result, every picture you see of a politician gobbling a corn dog looks funny and unflattering. Some are worse than others — Michele Bachmann’s recent photo, above, would be hard to top — but they all look bad. When you think about it, Rick Perry’s photo to the left isn’t really much better.
