I’m not picking on Politico‘s Shane Goldmacher here but his pre-debate coverage reminds me why I recently quoted David Foster Wallace on post-modern irony: “All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists.”
Goldmacher isn’t resorting to sarcasm in this piece, but it’s definitely a form of analysis that takes cynicism at face value. So, for example, we learn that Donald Trump is making a major tactical mistake in failing to do debate prep because he’s missing the chance to nail down his choreography.
The choreography of televised town halls can pose a particular challenge. How close you stand to your opponent, whether you make sure they are in your camera shot, how you interact with voters and even how comfortable you look on a stool can make the difference between winning and losing in the eyes of the electorate.
No doubt there are consultants available who will teach you how to answer high-pressure spontaneous citizen-generated policy questions in front of a live global audience with the presidency on the line while simultaneously making sure to hit your marks on the stage and look comfortable on your stool.
Little details do matter on television, and the savvy will explain to you that Trump suffered in the first debate because he hasn’t “mastered the split screen,” meaning he looked bad while Clinton was talking. It’s true, if you slouch on your barstool, you come off as spineless. You should smile, people like that, but not too much or they’ll think you have a screw loose.
Look, I can by cynical, too. None of that could possibly matter compared to Trump losing his temper and calling Clinton the ‘c’ word. Whatever else Trump said in his speech in Henderson on Wednesday, it mattered less than him aggressively mispronouncing Ne-va-da.
But think about this. You can’t teach temperament and you can’t cure ignorance once it’s weaponized. It’s not really cynical to point out that Trump’s problems can’t be cured through stage direction.
I admit that it’s not easy to find the right balance. We might wish that debates were won or lost based on substantive answers rather than on zingers and gaffes, cleverly placed trap doors and the post-debate game, but that’s sadly not the case. Clinton and Kaine have won their debates by understanding that the totality of the challenge involves a lot more than what happens in the moment. Trump did poorly during the latter half of the first debate, but he wasn’t slaughtered until he entered the post-debate spin room, went home, and started tweeting in the wee hours of the morning. That, in combination with the performance of a very prepared Clinton team, turned a bad night into a catastrophic one.
Likewise, Tim Kaine won his debate by not much caring how much he was liked by the live audience and focusing instead on making Trump unacceptable, driving a wedge between his opponents, and getting Pence on record making more than a dozen easily debunked claims.
We might lament that public opinion is swayed this way, but noting it isn’t the same kind of surrender to cynicism that focusing on split-screens and posture represents. Trump didn’t lose because he made faces. He lost because he wasn’t prepared to answer the questions and he demonstrated a terrible temperament. Pence lost because he sacrificed the truth and his running mate on the altar of looking reasonable when what people think about his running mate is the most important variable in this campaign. If Kaine rudely interrupted him, I guess we could call that a Pyrrhic defeat.
Going back to Goldmacher’s initial observation, if you’re committed to the most thorough possible preparation and you have the bandwidth to handle stage direction in addition to all your briefing books, then you should absolutely take the time to learn where to walk and how close to stand to your opponent. If every little thing could matter and you have the ability to prepare for those things, then you should do it.
It’s called being prepared.
As an analyst, though, how much do we want to substitute our own subjective experience of the candidates’ non-verbal cues for our opinion on what they actually said?
This idea that Al Gore sighed too much or Kaine was too aggressive or Trump frowned too much, that’s all in the eye of the beholder. But whether or not Pence was right that Trump never said all the things he said? That’s something you can genuinely help the public understand.
It’s true that even though Trump is very experienced as an actor and excels on a stage, the Town Hall format is a new challenge for him. It’s news that he can’t be bothered to take instruction and advice on how to approach that challenge.
But, when the debate is over and the pundits start weighing in about who won and who lost, the last thing the public needs is a highly-trained political journalist’s opinion about where the candidates stood on the stage.
And, yet, as David Foster Wallace said:
The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.
In our environment, the paid political analyst is so afraid of being accused of sentimentality and overcredulity, of a “willingness to be suckered,” that they don’t seem willing to dare to look the public in the eye and tell them which candidate was full of shit.
More than that, they’ve so given in to the savvy and sophisticated “take” that they don’t insist that it should matter which candidate was full of shit.
So, instead, they tell the public what the public subjectively felt, which is the one thing they are definitely not authorized to know.
I really don’t know what it will take to break this fever that has existed for so long. It is part and parcel of why I simply cannot abide almost any analysis that is undertaken after events, such as these debates. The banality and insipid level of the discussion from the pundit cognoscenti is beyond tolerable to anyone who values reasonable and intelligent analysis.
We have all witnessed how this level of obsession with the trite and ridiculous can take on a life of its own, to the point that it can actually influence an election, and lead to tragic consequences. But none of them seem capable of making the connection between the dots. They are so concerned and so focused on appearing credible to the things people that matter only within their own insulated tribe, that they fail to recognize the immutable damage that can be wrought by playing this sort of game. I continue to hold out hope that there will one day be a dawning realization that none of this advances the discourse or aids in advancing the understanding of their audience. But that’s where my own cynicism often kicks in, with the realization that there is no evidence that this is likely to occur in time to save us from something like Trump-ism, which is right now pounding on the door of our little American experiment, just waiting to be let in so they can burn the place to the ground. And these people might just be the ones to welcome the monster through the door, by virtue of their obsession with the quaint and trivial.
Ignore it – just wait for the snap poll.
Then go to bed.
Oh, you bet. Much more fun playing my guitar than listening to the likes of Chris Matthews, Hugh Hewitt or GAWD FORBID, Wolf Blitzer.
Just refresh twitter a couple of times.
You don’t really need to watch it either.
you’ve got this postmodern irony down cold!
If the voters say it floats, it floats.
And if she weighs the same as a duck….then she’s a witch.
And if Strongman Trump said he could float off the floor like a soap bubble, millions of his right wing authoritarian followers would repeat it on Facebook and Twitter, using the sheer volume of their own posts and retweets as evidence for it.
Shit, there’s people on this very site that would suddenly start exclaiming how floating like a bubble was a much better position than Clinton telling everyone floating was impossible, and people need to use their feet.
.
It was as if orders had been given that every post-VP-debate “analyst” must praise Pence for “not taking the bait” by responding to Kaine’s challenges to defend Trump’s outrageous comments (accurately quoted/paraphrased by Kaine).
When he instead just lied again and again and again that Trump didn’t say what he most certainly did say — it’s on tape!
Exchanges which the Clinton campaign had competently turned into a devastatingly brilliant ad within hours. Most brilliant in the direct simplicity of its structure: 1) short clip from debate of Kaine quoting Trump; 2) clip of Pence denying Trump said it; 3) clip of Trump saying exactly what Kaine had quoted Trump saying.
But hey, to the idiot pundits, by “not taking the bait” and keeping a calm demeanor, Pence won the Style portion of the “who won?” competition! Some even going further to call that trivia being “presidential”, setting him up well for a 2020 run!
Superficial stuff trum — sorry; just can’t do it — wins out over substance always on a superficial medium like TV. Especially when being assessed by such a superficial set of wankers as the current crop of pundits.
Nah. They are ignorant and lazy and talk up the fluff because it fills air time/column inches.
It’s true that there are plenty of people with jobs as columnists or television pundits who are unqualified to judge political disputes/performances because they don’t know their stuff.
But, culturally, the punditry class, including folks who are very well qualified to educate the public, simply don’t want to get caught acting like substance could possibly determine anything.
I call this a surrender because it’s making peace with the cynical take that debates are won and lost on non-verbal factors. It then guesses how the public experienced the candidates’ attitude, posture, facial expressions, etc., and reports that back to the public authoritatively.
It’s a very passive kind of analysis, which is bad in it’s own right. But the real problem is that they’ve denied the public what they actually have to offer in order to provide them with manipulative guesswork.
And they do it because sincerity is the greatest of all sins and thinking the public can think for itself is the worst kind of naivety.
The savvy know that the public are sheep.
But the analyst has a job, and to give up that job is to create a self-fulfilling prophesy and then to call yourself wise for selling people short.
a long-standing complaint I’ve expressed:
“Authoritatively”! Ha! (Yes, I get that you were being . . . um . . . “ironic”[?] there.)
My complaint is that by cherrypicking, e.g., Gore’s amplified debate “sighs”, then playing them on continuous loop (contrast with reporting accurately what the candidates said and — if they want to do “analysis”! — factually examine validity of those claims), these media hacks usurp our ability and right to form our own judgments, substituting theirs for ours while depriving us of the prerogative to form our own uninfluenced by their spin.
Manufacturing consent.
How do we know this is true? The objective evidence is at best split.
OK – so the argument is post debate Pence was shown to be a liar.
Where is the objective evidence that this mattered or that among voters the perception about who won changed? Trump’s negatives have not been effected.
In 1988 after the first debate ABC had the usual pundit fest about who won and Brit Hume was about to launch into an observation about Dukakis and NATO.
Peter Jennings interrupted him in mid-sentence to cut to a post debate poll on who won.
Brit expressed frustration. HEY – I AM THE PUNDIT. I DECIDE WHO WINS.
But that is not true. Every trial lawyer knows you are held accountable for how the jury votes, and not how a trial advocacy expert thinks you did.
The jury is the voters. If they say Trump won, he won. Period. If they say Clinton won, she won.
That is the only standard that matters. The goal in a debate (I taught it in college, debated in college, won my law school moot court competition) is to win the audience. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.
As a result these pundit fests have been made irrelevant. There is a 3 step process in the debate aftermath:
The important part here is the third – the objective evidence limits the role the expert plays, and it should.
Savy takes don’t matter. What the voters say does.
And as anyone will tell you who has taught advocacy, IT ALL MATTERS. Your demeanor, your voice, the substance of your arguments are all relevant. Human beings are not machines. We evaluate based on reason, credibility and intuition simultaneously.
Here is another lesson any debater or trial lawyer knows: Preparation is REALLY critical.
It probably needs to be stipulated that there are two distinct things under discussion.
These two questions usually have the same ultimate answer, but not always and not necessarily.
As regards the Kaine/Pence debate, I cannot fathom even a guess as to how it could have helped Trump.
It’s too early to compare polls, and there are so many other factors going on that Trump’s approval numbers wouldn’t be definitive.
When I say that Kaine won, my point is to look at the post-debate coverage and whether it was more positive or negative for the candidates. By the next day, this was no contest on television, print, or especially within social media.
The Kaine story was that he’d lost and that he interrupted. The Pence story was he’d auditioned for 2020, that he sold out Trump, that he wouldn’t defend him, that he lied about what Trump said, that Trump was upset that Pence did better than him, that Pence didn’t defend him, etc.
I don’t bring this up to make a strong argument about who won the debate so much as to point out that winning a debate involves a lot more than mastering non-verbal communication.
If you want to soften my conclusion to: “Kaine did better in the post-debate than the debate,” I’m fine with that.
“I don’t bring this up to make a strong argument about who won the debate so much as to point out that winning a debate involves a lot more than mastering non-verbal communication. “
Stipulated. I think there is a tendency of pundits to prefer these type of explanations because they do not require suggesting someone was right and someone was wrong.
“These two questions usually have the same ultimate answer, but not always and not necessarily”
Don’t agree about that. But I get the point
The media is what is wrong with debates. Moderators don’t want to talk about “boring” stuff like issues, because they want to treat politics like sports. You root for your team and argue about how your team did, and whether they should fire the coach, but you don’t stop rooting for your team just because they have a losing season.
The media treats the public like barely literate imbeciles who can’t bother to learn anything, instead of the way BBC News operates.
How many people are even aware that the head of the BBC apologized for its Brexit coverage, saying that they didn’t do a good job of educating the voters as to the real in depth issues involve. Can you imagine Jeff Zucker or Steve Griffith doing that?
Of course not! They only care about ratings, because that means $. Eventually, they will insist that the candidates don armour and fight each other in the arena like gladiators because that will mean higher ratings. They can even have colourful names like Hillary “Death From Above” Clinton versus Donald “The Terminator” Trump.
The best argument ever for why I have maintained all this campaign season that marketing oriented approaches to campaigns are destroying the actual political communication necessary for a democracy to function and that there needs to be found a more two-way process that voters get the chance to focus a candidate more than does a focus group.
Candidates do this easily with the people who provide them with lots of campaign cash. And that is the problem. The information that candidates live in is not representative of the public will or the best interests of the general public.
Yes, those can be contradictory. No one likes to swallow a bitter pill or be told that unicorns are imaginary. But give-and-take in some way could provide a better education of the electorate than do endless political ads in the best prevarication tradition of Bernays.
There have been lots of experiments over the past 50 years in participatory democracy, direct democracy, and various schemes for how you roll up the mandates from small assemblies into satisfactory mandates of increasingly larger numbers of people so that representation more closely tracks on solutions than factions. All this exactly as the existing political system gravitated more to a one dollar-one vote system. And rapidly advantaged fictional people: corporations, lobbying firms, party establishments. And disadvantaged ordinary voters in direct proportion to their ordinariness.
Marketing produces the dramatic event and advertising artform as necessities of promotion. And it produces similar necessities for place, product (the candidate plus value proposition), and price. All packaged up with the conventient wisdom of 100 years of marketing professionals and political consultants and advertising specialists.
And those produce the art and drama critics, who at first were exposing the fraud behind the advertising (Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President, 1968, for example.)
And those critics now have been schooled in the latest formal theories of criticism and in the emotional tone ascribed to current art.
What happens when another tone of art comes along? What happens when cynicism and irony become b-o-r-i-n-g? Well that would be a self-contradictory form of the current tone, wouldn’t it?
Who watches the debates?