Dr. Red Eye

On Friday, September 26th, John McCain and Barack Obama had the first of their three planned presidential debates. Of course, all the liberal activists and media members said Barack Obama won the debate while the conservatives said John McCain won the debate. Then you have the so-called “undecided” voters whom some networks used to gauge the winner (NBC showed a supposedly undecided voter from Chicago who said Obama easily won the debate…yeah, real undecided). And apparently, debate polls showed that Obama seemed to have won the debate while election polls indicated that Obama gained a “debate bounce.”

What criteria people use to judge a debate will clearly frame the supposed winner. For many, a lot comes from “looks”. ‘Did the candidate “look” presidential?’ is a constant refrain. For example, Al Gore’s constant heavy sighing during George W. Bush’s remarks during their debates in 2000 negatively influenced voters about Gore and is what people remember more than either candidate’s actual statements.

Fast forward to the spin following the first debate between McCain and Obama and you’ll hear a lot of similar analysis: Obama looked more presidential, he spoke directly to McCain while McCain largely ignored looking at Obama, Obama looked poised, didn’t stutter, etc. And I will admit to most of those points.

But what good is a candidate who looks good but sounds bad? That’s the case with Obama last Friday night.

Obama’s policy ideas are not just bad but disturbing. However, McCain, as a debater, didn’t do enough to take advantage. Meanwhile, Obama used some good debate techniques to escape unscathed despite his alarming ideas.

So what exactly was so bad about Obama’s ideas?

1. Meeting rogue leaders without preconditions.

Obama reiterated that he believes he has every right to meet with whoever he wants, including rogue leaders of states, with no preconditions. Big, big mistake. Bonus points to McCain for saying that without choking Obama in the process for being so naive. I’m sure it took a lot of restraint.

The leader of the free world absolutely should not meet with rogue leaders without preconditions. Doing so would, as McCain clearly articulated, legitimize their standing in the world.  The implications are obvious, and McCain continued to assault Obama’s stance on that.

But Obama, now on the defensive, slickly used the debate tactic of confusion. Here, he dives into semantics to confuse the audience, bringing up a new term: “preparations”:

“There’s a difference between preconditions and preparation. Of course we’ve got to do preparations, starting with low-level diplomatic talks, and it may not work, because Iran is a rogue regime.”

Obama continues the semantic tactic:

“Look, I mean, Senator McCain keeps on using this example that suddenly the president would just meet with somebody without doing any preparation, without having low-level talks. Nobody’s been talking about that, and Senator McCain knows it. This is a mischaracterization of my position.”

Actually, it’s Obama doing the mischaracterization. But the post-debate “fact-checking” pundits all missed it, even though McCain clearly pointed it out:

MCCAIN: He’s parsing words, my friends.
OBAMA: I’m using the same words that your advisers use.
MCCAIN: And Senator Obama is parsing words when he says precondition means preparation.
OBAMA: I am not parsing words.

To viewers, this kind of exchange quickly neutralized the charge McCain started to gain over this issue.

To add further confusion, Obama threw another defensive debate tactic into the mix: using the opponent’s supporters against him. This requires your opponent to stop being on the offensive and go on the defensive about someone on your side who may or may not disagree with you.

Here’s how Obama did it: he brought up Henry Kissinger, one of McCain’s advisors, and claims Kissinger “just said that we should meet with Iran — guess what — without precondition. This is one of your own advisers.”

Naturally, McCain must suspend his assault on Obama over the preconditions issue to refute Obama’s representation of Kissinger’s stance. After several exchanges over who is right about Kissinger’s stance, Obama concludes with the delay-tactic statement of “We will take a look”, meaning ‘we’ll have to wait until after the debate to find out what Kissinger meant.’

Sure enough, Kissinger defended McCain after the debate, saying:

“”Sen. McCain is right. I would not recommend the next president of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Sen. John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality.”

But this comes too little, too late: TV screens are turned off and few people bothering to follow up on this issue after the debate.

The “traitor” tactic combined with the “semantic confusion” tactic allowed Obama the equivalent of holding off his opponent in the boxing ring just long enough until the bell is rung. And sure enough, moderator Jim Lehrer, not liking the “did not/did too” type of debating at this point, moves on to a new lead question.

Obama wins in style without having actually won in content.

2. Handling Russian aggression.

Here, Obama tried the tried-and-true debate tactic of revisionist history by rewriting what he said about Russia. He states:

And we have to recognize that the way they’ve been behaving lately demands a sharp response from the international community and our allies.

Obama tries to imply that he gave a sharp response when in fact the media generally acknowledged that he gave a tepid response.

Unless the masses were following the situation as it unfolded with interest, most would not know that Obama gave a weak response, not a sharp response. But if you just tuned in at the debate and listened to Obama’s revisionist history, you’d think he was quite forceful on this issue.

So again, Obama wins in style without having actually won in content.

3. The economy.

Lehrer asked both candidates what they would cut to pay for the $700 billion bailout plan. While some people have criticized Sarah Palin for dancing around questions and giving “a flurry of words”, no debate analyst mentioned the inordinate “flurry of words” Obama used to dance around Lehrer’s question. Obama danced so well around the question that he would easily have won ABC’s Dancing With The Stars.

Obama couldn’t come up with a single example of what he would cut. He used the generic phrase “a range of things” but refused to describe what that range was.

Then Obama also added he wasn’t sure what next year’s budget would be. That should’ve sent red flags to everyone listening to the debate. If Obama is not sure what next year’s budget would be, then how can he promise to implement anything if he has no idea whether he can afford anything?

But to add insult to mystery, Obama then went right back to campaign rhetoric of what he wants to do, none of which had anything to do with Lehrer’s question about what to cut. It makes Palin’s answers seem brilliant by comparison. Here’s Obama’s long-winded, meandering, conflicting and ultimately empty answer:

“Well, there are a range of things that are probably going to have to be delayed. We don’t yet know what our tax revenues are going to be. The economy is slowing down, so it’s hard to anticipate right now what the budget is going to look like next year. But there’s no doubt that we’re not going to be able to do everything that I think needs to be done. There are some things that I think have to be done. We have to have energy independence, so I’ve put forward a plan to make sure that, in 10 years’ time, we have freed ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil by increasing production at home, but most importantly by starting to invest in alternative energy, solar, wind, biodiesel, making sure that we’re developing the fuel-efficient cars of the future right here in the United States, in Ohio and Michigan, instead of Japan and South Korea. We have to fix our health care system, which is putting an enormous burden on families. Just — a report just came out that the average deductible went up 30 percent on American families. They are getting crushed, and many of them are going bankrupt as a consequence of health care. I’m meeting folks all over the country. We have to do that now, because it will actually make our businesses and our families better off. The third thing we have to do is we’ve got to make sure that we’re competing in education. We’ve got to invest in science and technology. China had a space launch and a space walk. We’ve got to make sure that our children are keeping pace in math and in science. And one of the things I think we have to do is make sure that college is affordable for every young person in America. And I also think that we’re going to have to rebuild our infrastructure, which is falling behind, our roads, our bridges, but also broadband lines that reach into rural communities. Also, making sure that we have a new electricity grid to get the alternative energy to population centers that are using them.So there are some — some things that we’ve got to do structurally to make sure that we can compete in this global economy. We can’t shortchange those things. We’ve got to eliminate programs that don’t work, and we’ve got to make sure that the programs that we do have are more efficient and cost less.

Perhaps Obama forgot what the question was.

Lehrer didn’t because he came back to Obama, saying he thought he heard nothing, and asked for specifics, which Obama still couldn’t provide. McCain, on the other hand, mentioned cutting spending, ethanol subsidies (which Obama supports), and cost-plus defense contracts.

Bizarrely, when McCain offered to freeze spending on everything except defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs, Obama retorted that “you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.”

Apparently, Obama believes that recouping $700 billion requires a scalpel.

In the end, Obama danced so much and threw such a blizzard of words to make Charles Gibson and Katie Couric owe Sarah Palin an apology.

Obama then segues into his final poor policy of the night…

4. The Iraq war.

Obama says that one way to save money is “we have to look at bringing that war to a close.”

This is huge. So let’s break this down.

Obama made it clear in the debate that McCain was wrong to support the invasion of Iraq. But McCain made it clear in the debate that Obama was wrong to reject the troop surge in Iraq.

Both are right. In hindsight, McCain was wrong on invading Iraq and Obama was right. But now that we’re in Iraq, McCain is right on how to manage the war and keep the country stable while Obama is wrong.

Whether or not to invade Iraq is now history. We can’t do anything about it. On the other hand, since we’re in Iraq, we’re not looking at history but looking at the future…and we still have the ability to do something about it. What we need is someone who knows who to manage the war now. Obama clearly is not that man. He’s stuck in the past and making monumental mistakes in judgement for the present and future.

McCain didn’t articulate it that way and wasn’t as forceful in making this point as Obama was in making his, so again, Obama wins in style but not in content.

The bottom line

The President of the United States better be someone whose ideas you trust. Unfortunately, most viewers saw the debate as Obama winning due to style despite lacking in content. McCain has the right substance…he just needs help in delivering the style to go with it.