Based on composure and general impression, Obama appeared to be out of his depth in the debate. He seemed to lack confidence and was too defensive.
Of course Obama isn’t out of his depth at all — not even close – and the debate was the first time in a month that McCain hasn’t appeared to be the weaker candidate. Based on their cumulative campaign records, McCain is a train wreck — especially in the past couple of days.
Maybe my poor impression of Obama is due to the fact I came in a few minutes late, when he was evading Lehrer’s question about what costs should be cut in order to pay for the Wall Street bailout. They both evaded that question, but I thought Obama was a little worse — at least until his third crack at it, when he finally lit up to the idea that ending the war in Iraq would save billions of dollars per month.
Iraq was Obama’s strongest theme, the place in the debate where he really stood his ground, with unambiguous confidence, citing his record and pushing his progressive agenda at the same time. That was the only place where either candidate actually convinced me of anything in the debate.
In areas where I tend to agree with Obama, like being open to some dialogue with foreign antagonists, his defensiveness made me doubtful — even of ideas I worked out on my own – not so much because McCain was convincing, but because the contrast of McCain’s assertiveness to Obama’s sputtering defensiveness made me emotionally more confident in the former.
Quite the opposite to the effect of Obama’s acceptance speech.
Something that occurred to me in the course of watching the debate is how much has changed in the world since the acceptance speeches, yet Obama and McCain seem to quite slow to adapt appropriately.
The New Republic expressed a similar concern following the debate: ”Neither of them really faced the bailout head-on, sharply differentiated themselves from the other, or (most disappointing of all) tried to offer a big argument or central narrative about what’s wrong with the country.”
But then I realized that my feelings about this might be because I’ve been immersing myself in the thoughts and arguments (in columns and blogs) of people who’ve been the fastest and most effective to adapt their thinking to the crisis. And unlike the presidential candidates, I’ve had the opportunity to spend several hours every day following the news and reading the lively debate with an open mind while developing my own thoughts carefully in writing.
Whereas McCain and Obama don’t have that luxury. They’d already invested a lot of time, energy, and money developing economic policies suited for the earlier financial climate. And aside from the obvious fact that they’re both absurdly busy, they’ve both been deeply habituated through the course of months to think of everything in a very focused, media-oriented, ’campaign mindset’ – precisely the wrong mindset for addressing the financial crisis.
While I was thinking these thoughts I also felt myself really itching to be up on the stage, in the debate, answering those questions and challenging the weak positions of both candidates. Of course, hypothetically, if I was on that stage, I would be at least as ill-prepared to talk about these things as McCain and Obama, because I would have had to become as deeply absorbed in campaigning, etc..
This gets right into the bifurcated heart of what I love and hate about politics. I truly love tackling big issues, and that attraction naturally tends towards wanting to have an actual effect on the outcome, which naturally means being directly involved in legislation and decision-making. But that momentum carries me away from my true center of gravity in the intellectual sphere.
Following and blogging about events over the past few months has convinced me on one hand that I want to be in politics, and on the other hand, I’m convinced that I absolutely do not want to be a politician. There are different ways to manage a compromise – like becoming a journalist, strategist, or policy wonk — but those existing compromises all seem to lack much of the fundamental appeal, or value of what I’m looking for.
I know there’s a danger in projecting too much of myself onto Obama’s personality (especially considering he seems to be prone to such projections), but I’m going to do it anyways, not to presume to know anything about Obama, but to use hypothetical assumptions about Obama in order to generate insights relevant to my own situation.
In debates and other such settings, Obama’s mind seems to get distracted and split by two different aims — like trying to simultaneously stand on two conveyor belts going in opposite directions.
One aim (the aim that I imagine Obama is naturally inclined towards) is intellectual: to comprehend by seeing different sides of a complex case and working out all of the nuances. In politics, that leads to failure.
The other aim is that of the professional politician: to convince by appearing to have all the answers already, with certainty, stating them in simple terms with absolute confidence. This is something that Obama just can’t bring himself to do because he is so keenly aware of the uncertainty that’s inherent in any major challenge.
It’s like he wants to admit we need to wait and see, he wants to ask rather than answer, and he has to constantly pull himself back from following through on those natural inclinations — resulting in all those Ums and Uhs whenever he has to check his thoughts — but letting himself think out loud would be politically ruinous.
(As a semi-aside, if you watch the recent Couric interview, it seems that Sarah Palin is suffering from the inverse affliction, stammering because she’s pulling back on her self-assured political inclinations.)
Yet, in how many politicians has there been such a discrepancy between the quality in delivery of prepared remarks vs. the quality of unprepared remarks?
Not only is Obama a powerful speaker, but as James Fallows points out in The Atlantic, his writing is of such a quality that his speeches might hold their value as written works for many years to come. More importantly, Obama has produced great writing in the process of working out his ideas for governing, not simply after the ideas have become safely realized in the process of administration.
Fallows states that Obama’s speeches, ”explain the way he thinks and the values with which he would approach problems as they presented themselves,” whereas normally, “when politicians do try to lay out a new thought or policy, they tend to do so from the safety of incumbency, rather than as part of a campaign.”
The high quality of his ideas — not to mention his willingness to take risks by continuing to learn and develop those ideas — plus his ability to make a lasting emotional impression with his deliveries makes me wonder if maybe Obama is in the wrong line of work.
What could he accomplish if he focused on these strengths, rather than spending all of his time campaigning, having to restrain himself in mid-thought in order to make a safe political impression? What if he had an extra few hours per day to spend reading and thinking and writing about the financial crisis in depth, rather than merely chalking up some politically expedient talking points with his staff, cramming a few minutes of serious discussion between fundraisers and interviews and photo-ops?
I began thinking about this when I wrote my first piece on Obama: maybe he should just bypass presidential politics and go right into the kind of work that Bill Clinton and Al Gore do — not emulating them, but really exploring what can be done by combining charisma, intellect, openness, organizational acumen, and emerging technology into a movement that addresses the world’s greatest challenges and overcomes outmoded conventions and borders.
He might accomplish more that way than he could even as president. Then we’d begin to get an idea of what a 21st Century leader looks like.
