Open to Debate
By Joe Klein
Over the past month, a foolish narrative has been abroad in the land: that this election is going to be a "referendum" on Barack Obama. This is not uncommon in presidential politics--John Kerry's consultants fantasized that the 2004 election was going to be a referendum on George W. Bush--but it is usually peddled by weak campaigns that want to avoid dealing with their own candidate's deficiencies. Presidential elections are never referendums. They are, ultimately, a choice. Two candidates stand on a stage in debate: they talk; you decide.
Quite often, though strangely not in Kerry's case, the referendum gambit is a rationale for mudslinging. This year we have John McCain's attempt to paint Obama as aloof, messianic ... a celebrity, like Paris or Britney. The McCain ads have the slightly sordid quality of an inside joke: Oprah Winfrey called Obama "the One," and McCain's dyspeptic staffers latched on to that moniker, and now there's a sardonic ad using the messianic nickname, filled with celestial images of Obama smiling and orating grandiloquently, followed by Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea. When Obama--correctly--said that keeping your tires inflated was one way to conserve energy (and save some money), McCain distributed tire-pressure gauges stamped OBAMA'S ENERGY PLAN.
I may be missing something, but snark isn't a quality often associated with the presidency. "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant," Obama said, laughing at the McCain campaign's crash-and-burn fighter-jock puerility.
The attempts to dismiss Obama remind me of the Carter-Reagan matchup of 1980, another supposed referendum election. Ronald Reagan was ... a celebrity, a movie star, a right-wing lightweight. It seemed impossible--to most Democrats, at least--that he could win, although he did hold a slight lead going into the conventions. The fall campaign was very close--until, finally, the two candidates debated a week before the election, and the celebrity cleaned the President's clock. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Reagan asked in his closing statement. He seemed every bit as substantial as Carter and much less of a sourpuss. The race blew open after that, and Reagan won a convincing victory.
Fast-forward to now: this is a year that looks as good for Democrats as 1980 did for Republicans. They have a candidate who, like Reagan, is a fabulous performer and represents a major break with the past--and has a smaller lead than he'd like going into the conventions. And in the end, debates will almost certainly decide this election. The sheer, slimy audacity of the McCain ads has given him a nice midsummer run. The polling numbers haven't changed all that much, but Obama has been on the defensive since he returned from his overseas trip. And the zeitgeist of the race is headed toward sewage and mockery. It hasn't been quite so easy for Obama to dominate the news as he did before. Clearly, he needs to move the conversation toward the substantive differences he has with McCain--and the differences McCain doesn't have with Bush. The best way to do that is through a major, narrative-changing event.
Which is why I'm almost as puzzled by Obama's debate strategy as I am by McCain's advertising. Obama's decision not to accept McCain's offer of 10 summer debates--or, at least, to negotiate a more manageable total--always seemed wrong to me. After all, Obama is supposed to be the fresh breeze, and that would have been a brand-new, high-road way to engage the public. Obama's refusal made him seem less than courageous. It played into the notion that he wasn't a very good debater and that McCain was at his best in town meetings--an argument with elements of truth but also a fair amount of mythology. Obama has command of more facts on more issues than McCain does; McCain's strength at town meetings feeds off friendly crowds who roar at the jokes he's been telling for years. Obama's demeanor will show well on the debate stage; McCain's feistiness may not. And so Obama would be wise to change course now: challenge McCain to town-hall debates on the Sunday nights after each convention--one before a military audience, another with hard-pressed Rust Belt workers. He'd be wise to make this a campaign about issues instead of ads as soon as possible. It is true that debates often turn on one-liners and flubs, but more often they turn on sustained, vivid demonstrations of character.
It may be that Obama is not Reagan. It may be that he is more like Al Smith, whose Roman Catholicism was too much for a Protestant nation to handle in 1928. But if Obama is going to win, he's got to demonstrate, in the most dramatic forum possible, that he has the brains and disposition to be President. And he has to get this campaign around to Reagan's classic question: Are you better off than you were four years ago? time.com/swampland