Halfway through the third and final debate last night between
John Kerry and George W. Bush, I was ready for a nap. And that’s
saying something: Not only was I plenty rested — I’d slept in — I
was watching with the America’s Future Foundation gang, a group of
twentysomething conservatives and libertarians who watch debates
like they’re football games: plenty of beer and lots of cheers,
boos, and yelling at the screen. But I was yawning as I scribbled
in my notepad (“K: health care system ZZZZ…”), and the
crowd seemed restless, with lots of attrition away from the TV
screens and towards conversations in the back of the room.
I yield to few in my tolerance for wonkiness, and if I was
bored, it’s hard to imagine swing voters — typically a group that
is especially disengaged from politics — absorbing a great deal of
what was said. Both candidates quoted so many numbers that the
average head must have been spinning: there were nine references to
the number of times that John Kerry voted for or against one thing
or another, 29 percentages, 46 dollar amounts. If you listened
closely, and you could almost hear all the televisions flipping
over to baseball.
Among those who watched the whole thing, neither candidate built
up a huge advantage. Both were fairly engaged, and both did their
share of inappropriately smug smirking in the cutaways. And both
candidates had their share of zingers — Bush observing that PAYGO
means “You pay, and he goes ahead and spends,” Kerry comparing
“being lectured by the president on fiscal responsibility” to “Tony
Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country.”
When a debate is a draw or near-draw, the post debate spin-war
becomes doubly important. Some of the CNN talking heads were
calling it a “decisive” win for Kerry, which is crazy, but it
wouldn’t be the first time that a rather dubious assessment like
that became the conventional wisdom. The denizens of the mainstream
media may be expected to tilt toward Kerry for several reasons.
First, they’re liberals, of course. Second, many of them have been
convinced by liberal media critics that they were too hard on Gore
and not hard enough on Bush in 2000, and are consciously or
subconsciously overcompensating. Third, there’s an inherent bias in
election coverage against incumbents and toward tight races, for
simple psychological reasons: political reporters want to report
things that sound exciting and important. The potential for change,
and unpredictability, simply makes a better storyline.
All that said, the media’s influence is finite, and the story
that our esteemed press corps tells can change rather quickly given
the right catalyst, such as a gaffe or a shift in the polls. In as
much as it seemed never to end, last night’s debate may be a good
preview of the next two weeks.
