My perception of this debate was that it was a tie, with Obama winning on factual/substantive matters and McCain doing a better job on aggression. Thing is, verbal aggression isn’t a leadership test, not really–as we’ve seen with the current president, just because you can talk the talk and say, “Bring ‘em on,” doesn’t mean you have the slightest clue as to what to do when they take you up on your offer. Still, it canlook like leadership, and I’m sure that there are many who will see it that way. It can certainly be a winning debate tactic, and it was for McCain tonight to the extent that it let him set the terms of discussion, just as it was for Mr. Bush in the two elections preceding. It forces the other guy into a reactive posture:

MODERATOR: Senator Jones, what is your position on deep sea fishing rights?

JONES: I am for defending these fishing grounds with our lives and our sacred honor. I am a fisherman. I have traveled across this land and met fishermen. I wear a fisherman as a kind of codpiece. The fishermen know I will be on their side, whereas my opponent, my naive, ill-informed opponent, has said on many occasions that he would make a giant banana Secretary of the Interior.

SENATOR SMITH: That is not true. I would not make a giant banana Secretary of the Interior. You know what I said, Smith. I said “I like bananas in my breakfast cereal.” You continue to distort my record on bananas. I would not do that.

MODERATOR: Senator Smith, what would you do about our fishing grounds?

SMITH: It wouldn’t involve bananas.

JONES: See? Bananas.

MODERATOR: Let’s move on to our next question.

The accusation about bananas is completely nonsensical, but it gets the other guy reacting instead of attacking. As I’ve stated in earlier postings, Ronald Reagan knew what he was doing when he responded to a Jimmy Carter attack with “There you go again” (and I have no idea whether Carter’s line at that moment was right or wrong). You have to not respond point for point, but invalidate that whole like of attack. In Obama’s case, that might be saying, “Look, John, you can distort my record all you like. You’ve been doing it for this whole campaign. The problem is that nobody believes you anymore.” Alternatively, he might say, “You can attack me all you want, but the American people don’t want to hear attacks, they want to hear a plan. You haven’t even answered the question.”

Another good response to these sorts of distortions is outright ridicule. I once again invoke FDR, who famously turned a desperate 1944 attack on his dog around on the Republicans:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. [laughter] Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family don’t resent attacks — but Fala does resent them. [laughter] You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers, in Congress and out, had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or 20 million dollars — his Scotch soul was furious. [laughter] He has not been the same dog since! [laughter] I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself — such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog [laughter].

There is a recording of that speech here. Be patient — it comes late in Roosevelt’s remarks (about two-thirds in), which are otherwise worth listening to. For example:

The opposition in this year has imported into this campaign… a propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. Remember a number of years ago, there was a book, “Mein Kampf,” written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book, and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood. Always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible, if only you kept repeating it over, and over, and over again.

But I digress (no I don’t). The other area where McCain was able to turn things around on Obama was in the matter of the Surge. McCain may have been wrong about everything leading up to the Surge (as Obama pointed out) and wrong about everything after, but he’s going to keep clinging to the point that the Surge was “a success.” The answer here is not to quibble about who was right about the Surge, but how you define success. The Surge is but one event in a much longer chain. The war itself ain’t over ’til it’s over. The purpose of the Surge was not to win the war, but to buy time for political reconciliation. Has that happened in a significant or lasting way? Has the country been pacified for real, or is this just an extended time out? Since we can’t keep this thing going indefinitely, how likely is this to last when we leave? If it’s not going to last, then it hasn’t been a success, it’s just been a pause. So it follows that we shouldn’t leave. Ever. But that’s not workable either, and the trick is to entangle McCain in the logical contradictions of his own position. Again, Obama was halfway there, calling McCain on his other mistakes (the way he should have called him on his inability to decide even if he was coming to Mississippi), but it needs to go further: You got this one, small, inevitably transient thing right. You get a cookie. What else you got?

Some other, hopefully quick points:

* McCain’s insistence that federal spending has to be contracted during a time of economic slowdown or recession would be highly destructive.

*The same old attack on national health care, that it would place your medical decisions into the hands of the government, is getting really tired. Not only is it not necessarily true, but more to the point: there are a lot of people out there who don’t get to make medical decisions. They get inadequate care and they die.

*It’s one thing to have people say you’re the “Maverick of the Senate,” it’s another thing for you to say that you are. You’ve disagreed here, you’ve disagreed there. What did you do? The whole maverick/Ms. Congeniality thing is getting really tedious too.

*Cooperating with Pakistan over rooting out the insurgents in the border areas, as McCain insists must be the case, seems problematic given that Pakistan’s intelligence services are at least partially on the side of the bad guys.

*I guess McCain wanted to score points on words like “in/experience,” “naivete,” “knowledge,” “doesn’t get it.” We’ll see. It seemed repetitious and non-responsive to me, but there may be some other there who take these answers at face value.

Finally, a word on those bracelets that both candidates were wearing, and the stories that come with them: McCain said the bracelet he wore was given to him by the mother of a fallen soldier who asked him to ensure that the boy’s loss would not be in vain. Obama was very wise to say that no American soldier ever dies in vain for they are acting for the nation, but what I really want to know is how many more people have to die for Bush’s (and McCain’s) mistake to justify that bracelet that McCain wears? If it’s the wrong war, with the wrong resources, it can’t be done. No one has arm enough in the world to wear all the bracelets you would need. No soldier dies in vain who is the last casualty of a bad war, if his was the life that convinced you that it would be wrong to throw more lives away.

More to come, as always.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 10:16 pm and is filed under The Political Mindscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.