George Rebane
In presidential debates I haven’t seen a better performance than Romney’s since Reagan took the stage in the 1980s. While everyone and their brother is publishing voter sentiments on the debate, Gallup is strangely silent. It’s as if the debate never happened when you look at their website. I was hoping to use their poll to adjudicate a prediction competition (see ‘Prognosticators – An invitation to the dance’). The clearest voter sentiment poll comes from CNN with 67% saying Romney won, and 25% saying Obama won last night’s debate.
But what interests me most is the copy put out by many pundits this morning on the nature of the debate. The consensus there seems to be that the debate was a bit too obtuse with numbers and facts and all those specifics. This is a bit troubling, because it is a commentary on what the electorate really understands about how the country works.
I look at three levels of ‘information’ that candidates can deliver in such debates. The most detailed is the kind that Romney mostly, but also Obama, delivered last night. Going into specific dollar amounts, time periods, tax rates, and growth rates that decorated their plans and with which they painted their opponents plans. This approach assumes that the listeners have some basic matrix of knowledge ready to receive, organize, and then communicate the whole as all the numbers are hung in their proper places.
The next lower level of specificity is the declaration of their individual futures in broad adjectival terms like ‘full employment’, ‘more rapid growth’, ‘balanced budgets’, ‘tax breaks for the wealthy’, ‘level playing field’, and so on. These are formed into arguments and counter arguments salutary to oneself, and showing the opponent in the worst light. The strength of this debate format is all in the delivery, and the emotions evoked in the listener. Unless there is a surprising one line zinger, the results are primarily determined by the strength of what behavioral economists and psychologists call confirmation bias (q.v.). Basically, both candidates deliver big dollops of pabulum hoping that it comes across as substance to untutored ears.
The third level gets into political and economic philosophy in which both candidates describe the meta-structure and operating characteristics of how a society works. Here we will encounter such notions as ‘collectivism’ defined, the Laffer curve celebrated or castigated, the blessings and evils of laissez faire markets, the role of taxes in a recovery, the intrinsic responsibilities of government, the proper relationships of worker productivity and workforce levels as they affect GDP and the nation’s overall quality of life, the desired role of the US as world hegemon, and so on.
What almost every political junkie will agree on is that the middle level communicates ‘best’ with the electorate. After such a debate no one will complain that the candidates “spent a surprising amount of time on granular policy details.” Pure pabulum always comes in a perfectly clear package. It is there where the real connections are made with voters who think they understood the most of what was said.
My own preference is to witness what we did last night – the ‘granular’ level of discourse – or the third level. Truth be told, I’d like to hear most about the candidates’ meta level views of how they think humans work in different sizes of groups, what they consider as natural constraints on human cooperation, what meta-principles and constants should we derive from our Constitution, the role of culture(s) in maintaining America as a sovereign nation-state, the role of such states in the world order, and so on. To me understanding these beliefs of the candidates is most important, because it is these that will drive the general thrust of their policies while in office. The details will be mangled here and there by exigencies of uncontrolled events, politics, and God knows what else.
[5oct12 update] The 5oct12 lead editorial in the WSJ sounds like a compendium of RR posts characterizing the liberal dialectic in its commentary on Obama’s recent debate performance. Significant is the wider perception of how the Left uses baseless bogeymen of their own construction that they assign to their opposition, and then, shifting between great glee and high dudgeon, proceed to demolish. The other approach used not only by Obama, but also an established practice of the lamestream, is hoovering (q.v.) – just ignore and never mention the inconvenient facts. In this case Obama’s first term record has been completely hoovered and will continue to be so treated until 6 November.
In their post-mortems the Left is driven to develop desperate dust-ups as to why their Messiah finally got his socks wet traversing the Galilee. Beyond impediments like hypo-oxygenation, we now hear that Romney cheated by using notes. This was not a junior high school pop quiz. Both men had notes, and they should have. The United States and the world are complex systems described by uncountable numbers and processes. To talk, let alone debate, effectively about these, one should have at his disposal notes. Obama was so busy studying and writing his own notes that he could barely look Romney in the eye. Not looking compelling and important issues in the eye is a longstanding character weakness of his – we recall the litany of events ranging from the Gulf oil spill to the recent murders in Benghazi, the latter he has yet to look in the eye.
This south-Chicago demagogue was definitely shown to be out of his league by his flubbed ‘3AM telephone call’ even before he got to Debate1. And as his foreign policy onion gets peeled back layer by layer, we are finding out how truly incompetent are the White House sophomores now in power. In the larger scheme of things, no one wants to think about ol’ Joe being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office – talk about making Sarah Palin look absolutely brilliant. But we will have to confront the ramifications of that on 11 October for ‘Paul & Joe Show’.
Pardon me while I go light another candle for the President’s continued good health.
[8oct12 update] Given the lamestream’s spin and lamentations, if ever there was a picture worth a more than a word or two …
rebanesruminations.com 
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