Preparing for Failure: Dems Preemptively Spin Obama’s Debate Defeat

There’s a comforting reassurance that comes with low expectations. Despite his vaunted reputation as a rhetorical magician, Democrats have been downplaying the significance of the first debate, going as far as to anticipate President Obama’s loss. Depending on the quarter of the chattering class one listens to, he is either too smart, too philosophically deep, or simply too busy to be reasonably prepared for victory. Obama will fail because of his many virtues, his floundering evidence that he is the best man for the job.

Democratic functionaries and the mainstream media (whatever the ultimate difference between the two may be) have been flooding the news with accounts of the debate’s irrelevance. According to Glen Ifill, “debunking five myths about presidential debates” for the Washington Post, the debates have little consequence for voter opinion: “Gallup polls going back decades show precious little shift in established voter trends before and after debates.” One wonders if she considered them so insignificant when she moderated the 2004 and 2008 vice presidential debates.

Over at the New York Times, the Chief Washington Correspondent for CNBC John Harwood concedes that the debates can leave an indelible imprint on voter sentiment but that’s largely a function of shallow posturing rather than the articulation of political principle. For example, he attributes Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush to a spate of “minor factual inaccuracies”, “poor makeup that gave [Gore] an orange tint” and a “condescending, impatient demeanor”. It never seems to occur him to him that Bush’s opinions resonated with a larger swath of the American public or that they devoted much attention to a critical appraisal of either politician’s ideas. Apparently, presidential candidates don’t have a monopoly on condescension.

Some have been much more ambitious about their doomsaying, outrightly predicting a clear victory for Romney. Will this be because his positions are logically superior, better substantiated by empirical evidence, or unmistakably less evasive, more forthcoming, and laudably honest? No, not at all. First of all, Obama is disadvantaged by the pressure of the soundbite, incapable of delivering a decisive, crowd-pleasing “zinger” because he’s just too intellectually deep for such craven rhetorical gamesmanship. According to DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse: “I think the president will hold his own, but he’s not known for sound bites. And these are 60 second, 90 second responses.” The burden of bottomless profundity must be a cumbersome one to bear.

Woodhouse also laments the lack of adequate preparation time for Obama, given his hectic schedule: “Mitt Romney has had a lot more time to debate, the president has not debated in the past four years in terms, of a campaign debate.” He goes on to caution that Democrats are “trying to be realistic about expectations” since our harried President is “lucky to be able to devote three consecutive hours to debate preparation”. Obama campaign spokesman Jen Pasaki sounds a similar note: “The president will have some time to prepare and he’s been doing some studying, but it is certainly less than we have anticipated because of events in the Middle East, because of his busy travel schedule — because of just the constraints of governing”.

However, it’s actually been the constraints of ceaseless campaigning that have dominated his frenetic schedule. In the 21 days following his acceptance of the party’s presidential nomination, Obama attended 24 campaign and fundraising events. In fact, he has faced withering criticism for choosing appearances on The View and Late Night with David Letterman, not to mention lavish champagne fueled events with Beyonce, over meeting with world leaders who demanded his attention during times of crisis. Following the embassy attacks in Libya, Obama was roundly reproached for skipping more than half of his daily intelligence briefings, including more than a week’s worth leading up to the murder of Ambassador Steven’s by Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists. One would think such singular focus on reelection would make for meticulous preparedness on Obama’s behalf.

Even Obama himself has tried to preemptively diminish the importance of the debates, casting himself as the underdog fighting against all odds. At a recent fundraiser in Las Vegas he modestly assessed his own debating acumen, declaring he was “just okay”. And he seems to feel that the preparation is an uninspiring obligation, keeping him from more important duties. Referring to its apparently tedious demands he commented: “It’s a drag. They’re making me do my homework.”

But is it really a “drag” to be compelled to communicate a defense of one’s policies and principles to the people he represents? At one time, Obama considered this among his most central purposes. In an interview with Charlie Rose he averred:

“The mistake of my first term – couple of years – was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

And in an interview on 60 Minutes he expressed similar sentiments:

“I think that, over the course of two years we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that, we stopped paying attention to the fact that leadership isn’t just legislation. That it’s a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone.”

There’s something conspicuously unusual about this insistent projection of failure: up until recently, Obama was celebrated by his Democratic admirers for the power of his oratorical acrobatics, causing crowds to faint and swoon over speeches transcendently uplifting. Why are Democrats suddenly so nervous about his prospects for success at the podium that they’re preemptively spinning an unspectacular performance, ostensibly inoculating Obama against failure by predicting it, downplaying the debates by dismissing their electoral relevance?

The answer is twofold. First and most obvious, Obama will likely lose the debates because his policies have inarguably failed and are, therefore, inherently indefensible. Unlike a press conference presided over by fawning reporters or a scripted statement delivered sans a follow up interrogation, Obama has no choice at the debates but to confront a history of stark incompetence. In this situation, any measure of contrived rhetorical alchemy will come across as evasive obfuscation and any attempt at unvarnished candor will necessarily demand an admission of fecklessness. If he’s going to escape the damage potentially done by the debates through the sorcery of spin, it’s best to do that now, while he can still rely upon scripted communication delivered by a trusty teleprompter. For Obama, the debate has already effectively begun and the task at hand is to undermine the debate.

Secondly, and more importantly, it’s only half hyperbole to claim that Obama’s entire presidency is premised upon the limitlessness of his persuasive powers. His silver tongue was the instrument whereby he would deliver us from endless partisanship, wooing even the most intransigent conservative ideologues with political flummery. On the domestic front, he pushed stubbornly unpopular programs, like his signature health care bill, assuming that eventually an irrepressible charm offensive would win over a skeptical public. And his entire foreign policy is based on his diplomatic prowess, converting committed enemies into admiring friends, convincing the most devoted antagonists that the US is deserving of its affection rather than its enmity.

Maybe more than any other president in American history, Obama has identified governing with speaking, confident that he could bend and deconstruct political reality to meet his ideological demands. And now, confronted by the recalcitrance of reality to the manipulations of speech, Obama’s reputation as a verbal virtuoso is more a burden than a boon. The crowd will still expect his familiar magic, the kind that made a tingle crawl up Chris Matthew’s leg, but the thrill is gone, and his magic has been rendered mundane.

In this sense, the first debate is a referendum on Obama’s first term as president, a final test of his ability to rehabilitate political failure through the power of presidential poetry. But already anticipating defeat, Obama reveals the insuperable limits of speechifying, of even the most artful proselytizing. No words can paint his policies with the tincture of success and so he abandons them. Our most voluble president, on the eve of the biggest debate of his political career, is speechless.

Category: Election 2012, Featured