Post-Mortem of Obama's Debate Defeat: Sense and Nonsense

By Tom Kando

The media have saturated the airwaves with their spin on the October 3 Romney-Obama debate, ad nauseam. The verdict is unanimous - Obama lost. The discussions range from sensible to ridiculous:

(1) The President was complacent. Being ahead in the polls, he just wanted to run out the clock.

(2) He was not prepped properly. He was too busy governing. Or he thought that he was so much smarter than Romney that he didn’t need to be prepped (hubris). On the other hand, Romney has been toughened up by a year of debating many other primary candidates (including several imbeciles) Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Paul, Perry, Santorum.

(3) The President is too nice (like Jimmy Carter was). He is not a gutter fighter, even when this becomes necessary. He prefers joy, humor, and lovey dovey with his wife, rather than wrestling in the mud (who doesn’t?). Therefore he approached this first debate as if it were inconsequential, a chore. Next time, he must get mean and ugly, go for Romney’s jugular.

(4) Obama has gotten used to adulation, to crowds cheering him and laughing at his jokes. The debate must have felt like a cold shower. He smiled a few times, but this only looked awkward. The silence was deadly. Dependence on adulation makes a man vulnerable.

(5) This next point is very popular among conservatives. (See for instance Charles Krauthammer’s widely syndicated column of October 5): Obama is simply not as competent as Romney. Without a Teleprompter, he is no good at debates, at speeches, at remembering facts and statistics, all things which Romney did brilliantly during the debate. What these people forget is that most of the “facts” spouted off by Romney were lies.

(6) Al Gore’s theory: The President hadn’t gotten used to Denver’s high altitude.

(7) He was tired and jet-lagged. He hadn’t had enough sleep. So he should get a lot of sleep and drink a lot of espresso before the next debate.

(8) Some people are even saying this, I’m not kidding you: As a Mormon, Romney couldn’t do coffee in order to fortify himself for the debate. So instead, he carbo-loaded and increased his glucose level by eating a lot of pasta before the debate. This enabled him to come on as a gang-buster and beat Obama.

(9) To add to the nonsense (this is my own theory): Obama is a recovering ex-smoker. Maybe he has to fall off the wagon temporarily. This is well worth it, if it helps him get re-elected.

Well, you get the picture. A lot of bs, right? All this talk of a “HUGE” Obama defeat the other night is becoming tedious. Yes, yes, the CNN/ORC poll taken immediately after the debate showed that 67% found Romney the winner, vs. 25% for Obama.

But let’s take all of this with a grain of salt. How ephemeral and superficial are public opinion swings? How much exaggeration are the media guilty of? The debate/contest was probably a lot closer than the spinmeisters tell us. And Romney’s victory, by whatever margin, is based on a foundation of superficial telegenic impressions mixed with fraudulent statements. Surely the electorate is not going to be permanently fooled?

Still, there is a danger that President Obama’s team is going to engage in Group Think. This happens when an executive and his team convince themselves that their decisions are perfect, that they must never be questioned, and that dissenting views must be suppressed.

Psychological research has shown that Group Think leads to terrible decisions. A classic example of a President who surrounded himself with yes-men who were never permitted to question the President’s decisions was Nixon. An example of the opposite was President Kennedy, who encouraged dissenting opinions among his advisers, and thereby avoided bad decisions.

I fear that people like David Plouffe (Obama campaign strategist), Michelle Obama and David Axelrod (senior campaign adviser) may tell the President that his first debate performance was good, and that he only needs to stay the course. When Axelrod was interviewed right after the debate, he seemed to be in denial, saying that Obama had done well. This was not the case.

If Romney is elected, the plutocracy gets a stranglehold on the country. The US gets on a long-term trajectory of ever-growing inequality, of reactionary policies, of middle-class decline, of military squandering, of public services atrophy. The US will increasingly resemble Latin-American countries like Brazil and Argentina, another major economy in the world straddling the First World/Third World dividing line. leave comment here