The American presidential campaign process has become a parody of itself. There’s nothing new left: the conventions aren’t real conventions, the debates aren’t real debates; “October surprise” and “post-convention bounce” are practically scientific terms. The process is so ossified it practically sits in the American Museum of Natural History where commentators can pick over and anaylze the dried-up bones.
I read a few political news roundups every weekday — first and foremost, Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes and ABC News’s The Note, the latter of which is all media-insider-ish and fun. Sometimes, my extensive tour of the daily political media universe leaves me with an overriding theme or impression. Today’s is a big meta-thing about the first presidential debate: the debate itself is not as important as how the post-debate spin is picked up by the media. It’s the meta-debate that matters.
When John Kerry and George W. Bush step off a University of Miami stage at 10:30 tomorrow night, the battle will just be getting under way.
Just ask Chris Lehane, who was Al Gore’s spokesman when quickie polls showed his man winning the first debate against Bush by as much as 14 points. But Bush operatives began highlighting small errors Gore had made — such as saying he had visited Texas with the federal disaster director, not the assistant director — and calling the network morning shows with examples. By the time the New York Post ran the headline “Liar! Liar!,” the media consensus was that a heavy-sighing Gore had blown it. …
The post-debate debate “can influence things in a major way,” says Scott Reed, who was Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign manager. “Most people watching aren’t sitting with pad and paper keeping score, except for the media. The 72 hours after the debate are when all the decisions are made, both at the water cooler and on the front pages of papers.”…
Slate political writer William Saletan calls the post-debate analysis “huge,” noting that the average person probably doesn’t watch the whole hour and a half, or raids the fridge in the middle, and goes to bed without a fixed view of the outcome.
“What are you going to remember? You remember what’s repeated to you on TV or in the papers. It decides everything.”
And from the Los Angeles Times (courtesy of today’s The Note):
Four years ago, instant polls conducted by the media after the first debate between then-Texas Gov. Bush and Vice President Al Gore showed a narrow Gore advantage. Furthermore, respondents indicated in these initial measurements (taken among 500 people over the telephone in the 30 minutes after the debate ended) that the debates had almost no effect on their choice for president. Those who were for Bush before the debates remained in support of him immediately after. The same was true for Gore’s supporters.
Yet, within a week (a week during which not much else of substance happened in the campaign), Bush had gained 8 percentage points. In addition, polls showed that the American people had changed their minds and were now convinced that Bush, not Gore, had won the encounter.
How did this happen?
The Bush campaign had persuaded the media, and hence the American people, that the vice president was overbearing and presumptuous in his manner during the debate. And so even though some people had initially said Gore offered more elaborate answers during the debate, by a week after the encounter, the tide of public perception had shifted and Bush was believed to have won. With that belief came a significant narrowing of Gore’s margin in national polls. …
So each campaign’s real work will begin immediately after the debate, as both sides work to provide reporters with documentary evidence that the other side made mistakes, flipped-flopped and offered answers that were lacking in depth and specificity.
The candidates’ surrogates and operatives will try to draw the media’s attention to scripted sound bites each candidate has delivered in the hope that reporters and commentators will treat these comments as representative of what really happened and was most important in the debate.
The other theme I’ve picked up today: the debate format sucks. These are not going to be debates but “parallel press conferences” or a “joint press conference” or what have you. From NPR:
“A debate is a head-to-head, spontaneous, structured argument over the merits of an issue,” Rice says. “Under the ridiculous 32-page contract that reads like the rules for the Miss America Pageant, there will be no candidate-to-candidate questions, no rebuttal to your opponent’s points, no cross questions or cross answers, no rebuttals, no follow-up questions — that’s not a debate, that’s a news conference.”
Anyway, that’s my political-digest digest for the day. As if things weren’t meta enough already.