“There You Go Again”

The majority of Americans who saw the first of the three presidential debates on Wednesday, between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, acted as if they were witnessing a baseball game — or, better yet, a boxing match — in the sense that they already knew who they were going to vote for. What appealed to them was seeing if their preferred candidate could deliver a KO hit or, if not, could win on points. Only a small minority hadn’t decided yet and they — continuing with the pugilistic metaphor — are the true judges of the contest. They were the small audience at which the two opponents aimed.

The experts of The New York Times confirmed this the day after the debate. Citing the most recent poll by the upstanding Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, the newspaper pointed out that barely 3 percent of voters in the elections on Nov. 6 still did not know for whom they leaned — a 3 percent, by the way, that scholars in the field identified as people who are not very interested in politics.

So what answers do the undecided seek that they would bother to turn on the television to watch a presidential debate? What do they hear? Perhaps not much. Reporter Jack Shafer, a veteran of Washington, wrote this week on Reuters.com that “the best, and in many ways the intended, way to watch the presidential debates is with the sound off.”

Perhaps he exaggerated a little, but what he means is that it isn’t just the undecided, but actually a high percentage of TV viewers, who already know for whom they will vote. In the first place, a high percentage do not pay attention to the stream of economic surveys that the candidates typically present (as was definitely the case in Wednesday’s debate) nor to the detailed arguments for how to solve public health problems. More impactful is the subliminal message that candidates transmit through their body language, how they gesticulate, how much and when they smile, even how they dress.

This does not intend to minimize or downplay the impact of the economic situation on U.S. election results. (“It’s the economy, stupid!” as Bill Clinton’s advisors said in the 1992 presidential campaign.) Foreign policy can also carry weight, but much less. A revealing statistic: Only 30 percent of U.S. citizens have passports (contrary to 60 percent of Western Europeans). In situations like the present, when there is no clear consensus on how much the president is to blame for the economic problems and when there is no foreign crisis that grabs the attention of the voters, the perception of the candidates’ public personalities is particularly relevant.

When I was a correspondent in Washington in the nineties, a journalist friend explained to me the secret for finding out who was going to win the presidential election: Whoever is more like a television game show host will be the winner. The friend was guilty of excessive cynicism. People aren’t that superficial. But he was not entirely off base. If you look at the last nine U.S. elections, after Richard Nixon, you see that in all cases but one, the person who won played the role that my friend was referring to the best. The southern farmer Jimmy Carter to the clumsy Gerald Ford; the hearty actor Ronald Reagan to Carter’s folksiness; Reagan to the cold Walter Mondale; the champion Bill Clinton to the tense father of George Bush; Clinton to the hard Bob Dole; George Bush the sympathetic son to the pompous Al Gore; Bush to the stiff John Kerry; the charismatic Barack Obama to the foolish John McCain. The exception was Bush senior’s victory over the thorough and pleasant Michael Dukakis, who committed the greatest mortal sin for a White House candidate by opposing the death penalty.

As mentioned many times, what voters want is a president with whom they feel comfortable having a beer in their living room. (Or, in the case of the Mormon, Romney, a glass of water; his religion still prohibits tea.) More important than being the smartest kid in the class is being liked, knowing how to connect with people, whether they are rich or poor, white or black. Clinton was a champion politician because, like no one in recent history, he combined intellectual brilliance with a fine populist sensitivity.

The case of Carter and Reagan was especially instructive. Carter was an extremely intelligent president. In the debates he had with the old Hollywood cowboy, there was not the slightest doubt as to which of the two best mastered the details of the economy or the Cold War. But the moment that we remember most about those debates in 1980 was when Carter was in professional didactic mode and Reagan responded, with a big smile, “There you go again…” At that moment, Reagan positioned himself on the side of most TV viewers and they — many surely releasing bouts of laughter — identified with him. As the legendary columnist James Reston wrote about Reagan at the time: “People want him because he is like them; polite and more interested in the people than in the facts.”*

Obama isn’t Reagan or Clinton. He is more distant. He possesses an intellectual air that makes a lot of Americans uncomfortable. His greatest luck, and the bad luck lamented by many Republican activists and supporters, is that he does not have a Reagan or a Clinton against him. Romney projects a robotic personality; he is, from head to toe, a multi-millionaire company director, a member of the elite trying to transform, obviously unnaturally, into a popular candidate. The greatest part of his challenge now is having enough time to change his image for the 3 percent still undecided. The first debate, which everyone agrees Romney won, has opened a window. Obama has two more debates ahead to close it in his face.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.