I happen to be a boxing fan and have watched TV with great appreciation for many years as a succession of pudgy guys with Brooklyn accents fired off incredibly rapid-fire barstool-type commentary about “working the body”, “landing more punches”, “getting ahead on points but not scoring the knockout”, “dominating the ring” and so on.
This very distinctive and utterly American mode of sports analysis has evolved gradually over the years in close connection to the evolving rules by which professional boxing matches are conducted and scored. It is intimately tied to the unique way in which strategy, cunning, speed, power, physical endurance and willpower are combined in professional boxing. One can see the unique aspects of professional boxing as a sport and martial art simply by comparing it other martial arts like Muay Tai or MMA that have significantly different techniques and rules.
But what in blazes does any of this have to do with judging a presidential debate? The objective is entirely different – it is to convince viewers that a candidate will do a better job of running the county than his opponent, not that he is superior in a contest of verbal bullying and aggression that metaphorically mirrors physical combat.
Case in point – the notion that Obama’s willingness to say “I agree with you, John” on a number of points represented weakness on his part while McCain’s repeated use of the phrase “what Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand” should be tallied up as points for his side in exactly the same way as points are scored on a scorecard in a Las Vegas middleweight championship.
Usually, there is not enough data to show that this boxing match metaphor misconstrues what ordinary viewers are looking for when they watch a debate. Last night, however, a number of polls and focus groups all converged in their reactions to the debate (see the post below) and clearly indicated that they saw Obama’s refusal to do a “Rush Limbaugh/barroom loudmouth” imitation as positive thing and not negative one.
After all, don’t we really want our candidate to have the self-confidence and the character to calmly agree with the opposition when they happen to be right on an issue rather than insisting that every single word out of an opponent’s mouth must necessarily be boneheaded idiocy? Don’t most middle of the road voters want that too?
So enough with the bad Howard Cosell-Lennix Lewis imitations already. A debate is not a boxing match. It should not be scored as one.
A matter a fact, I gotta tell you Howard, if these commentators guys keep this up, they’re gonna run outta gas in the championship rounds. They’re behind on points and you can see their punches just don’t have any real power behind them any more. The body work they took in the early rounds has done its job and they are starting let their guard fall. They got a big swelling over the left eye that’s probably gonna open up soon and could stop the fight. They are going to have to go for a knockout early in the tenth or the judges are going to take it away from them.

Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld of TPM ElectionCentral have early poll numbers from CNN and CBS polls, both of which indicate a big win for Obama.’ (CNN wrap-up here)
Brian Montopoli reports that a CBS News and Knowledge Networks poll of 500 uncommitted voters indicates that 39 percent said Obama won the debate, with 24 percent favoring McCain and 37 seeing a tie. In addition, 46 percent of uncommitted voters say their opinion of Obama improved, compared to 32 for McCain.
On ongoing poll of Wall St. Journal readers (over 55,000 thus far) has Obama ahead by 53 to 38 percent as we go to press.
Amy Sullivan of Time’s ‘Swampland’ has a report on Stan Greenberg’s focus group of 45 undecided voters, 38 percent of whom said Obama won the debate, with 27 percent giving the advantage to McCain and 36% saying that neither candidate had a clear win.
Daily Kos has a video clip on Frank Luntz’s focus group of Nevada undecideds, who gave Obama a 27-17 edge.
Looking ahead, Palin goes into Thursday’s debate with lowered expectations, as a result of the Couric and Gibson interviews. Conservatives are very worried, and National Review columnist Kathleen Parker has called on her to step down. Another conservative writer, The American Spectator‘s Phillip Klein, says “Palin is not ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Here’s the link

The very funny (if not always family-friendly) sports blog Every Day Should Be Saturday has a fake wire story up entitled: “Feds call for 38 point bailout of USC,” suggesting that a retroactive allocation of points to the once-invincible Southern Cal Trojans is necessary to stabilize college football after last night’s shocking loss to Oregon State. There’s lots of hilarious stuff in the comments thread, too, about the costs and moral hazards involved, including a particularly incoherent take from someone posting as “Sarah Palin.”
Given the vast and ancient prevalence of sports metaphors in politics, it’s appropriate to run the metaphors in the other direction now and then.

Over at The Nation, Chris Hayes very nicely sums up the perspective of many individual members of Congress, Democratic and Republican, towards the bailout negotiations:

1) The bailout is unpopular: The polling on this is muddled, but the polling is completely dependent on the wording. Every single lawmaker is getting barraged with hundreds of calls a day from constituents, and no one is saying: “Please give lots of money to Wall Street!”
2) The crisis is terrifying to lawmakers: They’re getting insanely heavy pressure from the vulturous Wall St lobbyists buzzing around the Hill (“there’s a gazillion of ’em!” a staffer told me earlier in the week) and also, dire and sober warnings from Bernanke and Paulson behind closed doors. Basically, if you don’t pass this, they’re being told, you’ll have the blood of another Great Depression on your hands.
3) Ergo: The optimal outcome for all lawmkers is to vote against the bill and still have it pass. That way you get to have your cake and eat it, too. But what we’re dealing with is something akin to a massive prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone wants to get into the decision quadrant of voting against the bill and having it pass, but of course if everyone rushes for that quadrant, then the bill doesn’t pass and therefore, no one ends up in that quadrant. If you’re Pelosi and the Democrats you can’t allow the Republican wingnuts off the hook by creating the space for them to crowd into the sweet spot, and then use the bill to run against you. That’s why things are so tenuous and difficult to game out.

This is pretty much what Ed Kilgore was warning about earlier this week. If the bailout passes, the consequences will be bad and very tangible, particularly since nobody’s under the illusion that a bailout will prevent a recession. Nobody knows how much worse things would actually get if the bailout fails. So if it does pass, you definitely want to be recorded as voting against it, particularly if you are vulnerable Republican.
The “prisoner’s dilemma” Chris refers to is a famous game theory conundrum in which it will always be in the selfish interest of one accomplice to a crime to betray the other, even though cooperation would produce a better overall result.

As we continue to await news of the latest round of negotiations on the financial bailout, John McCain has already taken credit for saving the day, and is now unsuspending his campaign and headed to Oxford, MS, for the presidential debate he tried to delay.
The evidence his campaign offers for this astonishing claim is that House Republicans are now represented in the negotiations.
Since said House Republicans object to the basic structure of the agreement reached yesterday by a bipartisan group of House and Senate banking committee members, it’s a little strange to suggest that enabling them to blackmail their way into the negotiations represented some sort of breakthrough. And if they somehow do succeed in driving the “deal” in their favored direction of capital gains cuts and deregulation, and away from Democratic demands that taxpayers secure an equity position in bailed-out companies, along with limits on executive pay, then you can confidently expect a revolt among congressional Democrats that will be larger and more significant than the McCain-assisted hissy fit from the Right yesterday.
Any way you want to slice it, the idea that Washington is closer to a consensus deal than it was the moment John McCain suspended his campaign on Wednesday and went blundering into the bailout negotiations is ridiculous. McCain did indeed get his photo op, and probably got some brownie points from conservatives for implicitly backing their point of view. But it’s quite clear that people in Congress today are not watching him ride off in triumph and gratefully saying to each other: “Who was that masked man?” More likely, they’re happy to see the back of him.

Will he or won’t he? As I write, John ‘Hamlet on the Potomac’ McCain is still dithering over whether or not to honor his commitment to debate Senator Obama tonight, rudely leaving many McCain supporters as well as his adversaries, in the lurch. Voters are supposed to believe that he can’t take a few hours to fly to Mississippi and proceed with the debate as he agreed because his physical presence in D.C. is so urgently needed.
Hard to say what McCain will do at this point. MS Governor Barbour reportedly expects him to show. GOP strategist Ed Rollins doesn’t think so. Who could blame Obama — and level-headed voters — for saying “Oh, whatever.”
No telling how McCain’s latest stunt will play with voters on Nov. 4. As our staff report indicated yesterday, most voters want the debate to proceed, albeit with some discusssion about the economic crisis. Yet, on election day McCain’s debate vacillations could be old news.
Meanwhile Katie Couric’s interview with Governor Palin yesterday did nothing to dismiss the argument that McCain picked a lightweight or that her selection was “gimmicky,” as GOP strategist Mike Murphy termed it. McCain may survive waffling about the first debate. But my guess is that one more such stunt would be “strike three” with many, if not most undecideds.

Well, it’s basically Close of Business in the eastern time zone, and if anyone has a clear idea of what’s going on in Washington, they’re keeping it to themselves.
Yes, there was an “agreement in principle” involving senior members of the House and Senate banking committees that appears to cover a lot of the demands Democrats have been making for changes in the Paulson Plan, including a “‘phased” approach to distributing bailout money.
But now the crafters of that agreement must go into negotiations with Paulson himself. And in the meantime, House Republicans are threatening a revolt against the basic principle of government purchases of bad securities.
And it’s totally unclear what, if anything, of substance came out of the “summit” that John McCain demanded with Bush, which Obama reluctantly attended. And it’s also unclear whether McCain, having inserted himself into the middle of this delicate process, is planning to help herd Republicans along or blow the whole thing up so he can claim to put it back together again.
Nobody knows, either, whether McCain is going to show up at tomorrow night’s debate, though he is planning all sorts of media appearances.
I’ll write more when there’s more to write about. It’s a day as mysterious as yesterday was weird.

CQPolitics Poll Tracker reports on two new polls, by The Marist Institute and SurveyUSA indicating a strong majority of Americans want tommorrow’s debate to continue on sked. First, from the CQPolitics wrap up of the Marist Poll, conducted 9/22-23, with 5 percent m.o.e:

Voters say by a 53 percent to 42 percent margin that Friday’s presidential debate should go on as planned despite John McCain’s call to cancel it while the nation deals with its financial crisis, according to a Marist Institute poll conducted yesterday…Democrats favor pushing on 80 percent to 15 percent, Republicans side with McCain 76 percent to 21 percent and independents want the debate to proceed by 53 percent to 40 percent.
…Twenty-eight percent of voters say the face-offs will help them make up their minds, while 71 percent said they had already decided their choice. For undecided voters, 87 percent are counting on the debates to help them choose and the same is true for 38 percent of independents.

The SurveyUSA poll, conducted 9/24-25 found:

Three of four Americans say the Friday debate should be held on Friday…Twenty-three percent say the debate should be postponed, up from 10 percent yesterday Wednesday.

The Marist Poll also found that 48 percent of RV’s want the candidates to “talk about economic issues, given the ongoing economic turmoil, as opposed to foreign policy which is the topic of the first debate.” The Poll also indicated that 48 percent expect Obama to win compared to 37 percent for McCain.

Yesterday was quite a trip through the Twilight Zone, eh? To sum it all up, it was a day when an Address to the Nation by the President of the United States warning of imminent economic collapse was pretty much a minor footnote.
At this point today, there are a lot of important things we don’t know. Will a bipartisan deal on a financial system bailout be announced, as key negotiators have hinted? Will John McCain or Barack Obama be “players” or photo-op-bystanders in any deal? Will investors respond positively to news of massive new subsidies? Will homeowners get any protection? Will banks continue to fail, and will credit continue to shrink?
Will there be a presidential debate tomorrow night, and if so, will Barack Obama debate an empty chair, as so many candidates for offices high and low have done in the past when their opponents refuse to debate? (Though normally, the non-debating candidate is one with a big lead).
While we don’t have answers to any of those questions, we did learn, or re-learn, an important thing about John McCain yesterday. For all his talk of “honor,” the man really is willing to do just about anything for political advantage. He’s a “maverick” against decency.
Consider yesterday’s events. Barack Obama personally and privately called up McCain and proposed a joint “statement of principles” on the financial bailout, to be worked on in secrecy by staff. McCain agreed, and then, without a word of notice to Team Obama, unilaterally announced his campaign suspension, his demand that the debate be postponed, and his challenge to Obama to accompany him to Washington to get into the middle of the negotiations.
Clearly, no one in Washington had asked for McCain’s help in the negotiations; since he’s missed every single roll call vote for five months, his colleagues may have well forgotten that he’s a member of the Senate. There are, in fact, just two possibilities about this stunt: either it was, as Barney Frank suggested, an incredibly reckless act that threatened the negotiations, or if there was any value to McCain’s involvement, it could have all been done in private, away from the cameras.
Meanwhile, McCain refused to sign onto a statement of five principles proposed by the Obama camp, though he did agree to a completely empty statement of concern about the financial crisis. This morning, as Tim Fernholz of TAPPED reports, at the Clinton Global Initiative event (an appearance that somehow did not qualify for cancellation), McCain articulated four of the five proposed principles as his own, in some cases using the exact words of the Obama proposal.
This, my friends (as McCain would say), is a pattern of unmistakably weasely behavior, made no more palatable by the fact that is was all trumpeted as exhibiting the candidate’s selfless commitment to “country first.”
A lot of Democrats yesterday thought the disingenuous nature of McCain’s histrionics would be obvious to voters, and would hurt him badly. I’m not so sure about that, but no one should be surprised at any tactic this campaign descends to from here on out.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist