Campaign Diaries

Despite Jim Lehrer’s best attempts to get the candidates to engage each other, neither candidate attempted to land a deadly blow. There were no memorable one-liners, nor any gigantic mistakes. This debate is unlikely to give one candidate a jolt of momentum - and that is better news for Barack Obama since it is John McCain who is playing catch-up at the moment.

The foreign policy debate was McCain’s best opportunity to convince voters Obama was too risky a choice on national security. While it might be too early to say that Obama managed to address voters’ doubts, it seems safe to say that McCain’s attempts to paint Obama as an ignorant ingenue did not succeed in disqualifying his opponent.

To try to declare a winner in a debate with no home run is an inherently subjective exercise. It is difficult to know what undecided voters might react to or what they were even looking for. But when a debate lacks a defining moment that dominates people’s perceptions, the overall visuals become that much more important. And here is where Obama might have gained an edge tonight: he seemed to be more in control of his image, and better aware of what is likely to come across well on television.

In one of the debate’s tensest moments, Obama turned to McCain to attack his support for the Iraq War. “John, you like to pretend that the war started in 2007,” he said, before launching into a list of McCain’s early mistakes. “You were wrong,” he asserted repeatedly. This was a made-for-TV moment, and McCain’s immediate comeback was bound to work its way in the clip that cable news are now going to play over and over again. So what did McCain answer? “I’m afraid Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.”

Ouch?

That moment exemplified one of the night’s trends: McCain let Obama get under his skin and wasted some of his time on attacks that are unlikely to do much good. Pressed on his refusal to say that he would meet with the Prime Minister of Spain, McCain responded, “I’m not going to set the White House visitors schedule… I don’t even have my own seal yet.” Was that even intended to convince anybody? Besides political junkies who treat every campaign subplot like a major story, I doubt more than a handful of voters understood that the seal reference was meant as an attack against Obama, let alone what it was referencing.

More often than not, McCain’s shots seemed solely designed to let him vent his contempt. McCain must have known that he had to control his awkward smiles, and yet his condescension was stunningly transparent throughout these 90 minutes.

He smirked, he sneered, he scoffed, he sighed - sometimes audibly even when he was not on screen - in what seemed like a remake of Al Gore’s first debate performance in 2000. McCain looked impatient when Obama spoke, and that impatience trickled down to his own answers. This was especially the case in the debate’s second half, when McCain seemed to grow more personally invested. How voters come to view this aspect of McCain’s performance will be decisive: Will it be seen as passionate or as erratic and overly negative?

My sense is that McCain’s making no effort to hide his obvious disdain for Obama will make viewers conclude the latter. The Republican nominee was determined to cast Obama as an inexperienced politician. Over and over again, he repeated that Obama “doesn’t understand.” But it is one thing to make a forceful appeal to experience, it is another to repeat at the beginning of seemingly every answer that Obama has no idea what he is talking about. For one, that claim doesn’t sound credible when Obama is clearly holding his own on policy questions; and plainly disrespecting your opponent is rarely a good idea.

Meanwhile, Obama looked determined to keep a sober tone and did not let himself grow emotional or overly irritated throughout the debate. That was a stark contrast to some of his confrontations with Hillary Clinton, who often managed to get him exasperated. In many ways, this hurts Obama, who sometimes looked more discursive than emphatic - though he has made progress on this since the Democratic debates. But in this particular debate, the contrast with McCain’s impatient responses should play well for Obama.

Obama looked steady, and in times of crisis that might be what voters are looking for. He did not tremble or seem out of his element, addressing some of the doubts undecided voters have.

What makes such a debate so difficult to judge, however, is that other viewers are likely to have widely different reactions to the same visual cues. Take, for instance, the fact that Obama often turned towards McCain but that McCain religiously avoided looking towards Obama. What some might see as McCain disrespecting his opponent, others might see as Obama being overly deferential - and that’s clearly the spin the McCain campaign is looking to put on the debate. (Another dynamic whose impact it is too early to determine is the age factor, as the generational gap was quite apparent throughout the debate. Will it strengthen McCain’s experience appeal or Obama’s “change” argument?)

I am aware that most of these points focus on tonight’s visuals, but that is only because the candidates seemed to neutralize each other substance-wise. But it is still worth taking a closer look at the night’s substantive factors.

The best news for the GOP is that most of the debate was waged on McCain’s turf: one of the most extended back-and-forths concerned Obama’s meeting with foreign leaders without preconditions, and much of the economic discussion was centered on tax cuts - a theme Republicans are always happy to discuss. Yet, Obama never lost ground while on the defensive. Most of his answers were crisp and he had some strong responses to McCain’s attacks (”Wildly liberal? Mostly that’s just me opposing George Bush’s wrongheaded policies.”) He also held his own throughout the foreign policy discussion and effectively pivoted terrorism-related questions to Afghanistan.

Inversely, McCain did better than expected in the opening segment on economic issues. Earmarks were to McCain what Afghanistan was to Obama: no matter the question he was asked, the Arizona Senator delivered a lengthy attack on wasteful spending. Did McCain aides even expect to have this much time to talk about one of McCain’s preferred topics tonight? Sure, earmarks are probably not the first and foremost economic issue on voters’ mind right now, but neither is Afghanistan the first national security issue voters think of when they worry about national security.

Furthermore, while Obama’s answer on tax loopholes was one of his strongest of the night, McCain’s surprising decision to float the possibility of a spending freeze allowed him to briefly look like the more bold and presidential candidate; Obama stayed too vague when Lehrer pressed him to explain how the financial crisis would change his plans, and his answer to McCain’s spending freeze claim could have gone much further in ridiculing McCain’s proposal.

In fact, both candidates seemed to accumulate missed opportunities in their responses. On the one side, McCain could have done much more to distance himself from President Bush.He barely tried to make the change argument tonight, and his listing issues on which he has disagreed with Bush sounded too flippant; considering that all polls show that this is one of McCain’s major problems, he should have done a more careful job in walking viewers through those differences.

McCain often seemed to tie himself to his party label by betting his political success on the continuing popularity of whatever is left of conservative ideology. His prolonged railing against meeting leaders without preconditions and his insistence on talking about tax cuts and spending were arguments that could have resonated more strongly with the electorate in 2000 or 2004, not after eight years of Bush.

On the other hand, Obama should have gone further in tying McCain to his record and to his support for now-unpopular policies. Though Obama did repeatedly attack the conservative economic ideology in the first 30 minutes  - a remarkable feat for a candidate who until a few weeks ago stayed away from most such ideological pronouncements - he did not sustain his attempts to link McCain to Reaganomics, nor did he hit his opponent as hard as he could have on an issue like Iraq.

The first snap polls taken by CBS and CNN as well as the first focus groups (Frantz Luntz and Greenberg) whose results have been made public suggest that Obama gained the most tonight, but it will take a few days for polls to start reflecting what effect - if any - this debate had. There are still two presidential and one vice-presidential debates, and the burden will be on McCain to make them more memorable than tonight’s encoutner.