The Socialist Primaries à l'Américaine, or Five Things Not to Do on TV

We all remember when Arnaud Montebourg came to the United States to try to gain a better understanding of how the Democratic primaries were organized across the Atlantic. Now, at a time when Socialist heavyweights are preparing for their first televised debate, it seems appropriate to give them some advice in light of the current U.S. campaign. Obviously, there is no Democratic primary in the U.S. since no Democrat is running against Barack Obama. Nonetheless, the Socialists (France) can draw valuable lessons from the two major Republican debates that have taken place so far.

Here are five things not to do on TV, with a bit of humor of course.

1. Don’t appear to be the favorite: Texas Governor Rick Perry learned this the hard way. As a newcomer to the race, he was already around 20 points ahead of Mitt Romney, the Mormon from Massachusetts, and was ahead of all the others by several strides.

The result: He became the primary target of his fellow candidates, who spent the last televised debate attacking him one after another. Perry, a poised cowboy, had a little trouble.

2. Avoid making sensational and radical statements: Once again, Rick Perry made a big mistake during the televised September 7 debate. He went off on the U.S. social security system, equating it to a Ponzi scheme and suggesting that he would do away with it. He was suddenly forced to back-pedal in the following debate, assuring that he only wanted “to open a national debate on social security.” But he lost a lot of potential moderate Republican voters who found his positions too extreme.

3. Don’t flirt too closely with the opposing team’s ideas: This here is poor Mitt Romney’s ball and chain. When he was governor of Massachusetts, he developed a health system that allowed universal coverage of all residents of the state, a reform that was in theory highly welcomed. But not in the Republican camp, which finds Romney’s plan too similar to the one Obama just passed — the one that they want to get rid of. And as soon as the discussion turned to health care, Romney kept getting lost even in the least complicated responses.

4. Do not make musical references that nobody understands: Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah, was the only Republican in history to use Kurt Cobain in one of his answers to a question about the pension system during the debate hosted by CNN and the tea party. The one small problem was that nobody in the audience seemed to have heard of the lead singer of Nirvana … and so the joke was a big flop.

5. Do not neglect your hair: At the risk of sounding misogynistic, what happened to Michele Bachmann, elected official of Minnesota, must be told. For several weeks now, her elegance and hair have been all the rage among American women. The permanent smoothness and bounce with light-colored highlights is now a must in salons and it even has a name: “the Bachmann.” Every housewife keeps asking for it. But on September 7, Michele Bachmann went on the NBC televised debate with a somewhat surprising new look that consisted of overly puffy and disheveled hair — think Cruella de Vil. The Internet went straight into a panic over this new hairstyle, wondering what had happened. And then the lovely Michele went back to her sensible hairstyle for the next debate.