Friday night is The Big Debate in Mississippi between presidential wannabes Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain and both candidates are reportedly hard-at-work preparing for the debate — and the all important battle of the enduring sound bite, which could shape the conventional wisdom regarding who won and who lost. And boost one of them in the polls.
A good debate performance can generate Big Mo and in a tight race such as Campaign 2008 the impact could be significant.
Both McCain and Obama have been steeled in the boiling political cauldrons of their party’s respective primaries. Both proved to be uneven debaters — with good days and bad days. In the days immediately before the debate, look for both to start trying to raise expectations about how their foe will do and lower expectations about how they will do. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Washington correspondent reports:
Democrats and Republicans worry that their candidate risks squandering the chance to open up a decisive opinion poll lead when the two men appear on the same platform for the first time, at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. But the rival camps have very different plans: to sharpen Senator Obama up and to calm Senator McCain down.
The McCain camp are confident that he has the knowledge he needs for the televised head-to-head, which will concentrate on foreign policy.
They are working primarily on quelling Senator McCain’s notorious temper, which they expect Senator Obama to try to provoke, and they are having fun trying to goad their man into a towering rage. “We’ve got licence to abuse him, to say the worst things we can about him to his face,” said one McCain camp official.
“It’s quite liberating, actually. Whenever he looks like getting mad, we just say it’s for his own good.”
The McCain entourage says its man will deliver a series of sharp sound bites that are being drawn up by his speechwriter, Mark Salter, and that he will speak passionately about the lessons of his military service.But they want to prepare him for what they predict will be attempts by Senator Obama to paint him as an out-of-touch Washington old timer, who at 72 would be the oldest first-term occupant of the White House.
Both candidates will likely look at the two role models for debaters who came up with memorable, news-grabbing phrases that resonated in the headlines and history books but had different results on Election Day. On the Republican side: Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again…” aimed at then-President Jimmy Carter. On the Democratic side: then-Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s “You are no John Kennedy,” aimed at then-Sen. Dan Quayle. Both candidates sides are likely fine-tuning the memorable rejoinders now — phrases that will be used at the first opportunity.
Senator Obama is spending hours a day studying policy briefings. “He’s been doing a lot of reading,” his chief strategist, David Axelrod, confirmed last week.
Democratic strategists expressed concern that he was not spending enough time working on his debating skills, which are not as polished as his solo platform speaking.
In fact, debates have been more of a negative for Obama than a positive. He has been less than eloquent in them and during the primary season on several occasions his poll numbers dropped after a debate.
While the Obama campaign confirmed that Barack Obama will be prepping this week in Tampa, Florida, the Republican presidential hopeful has a different approach.
A source inside the McCain campaign says the Arizona senator has been prepping on the campaign trail for the past several weeks and took time Saturday to prepare. This source says as of now, John McCain is not expected to take days off before Friday’s debate to prep.
One other item of note: Greg Craig, a former State Department official under President Clinton and a longtime Obama supporter is reportedly playing the role of John McCain in the Illinois senator’s debate practices.
Meanwhile, the AP’s Chris Wills wonders which Obama we’ll see:
Which Barack Obama will show up for the first presidential debate?
It could be the tone-deaf debater who condescendingly told Hillary Rodham Clinton during a Democratic debate that she was “likable enough.”
Or perhaps the confident candidate who absorbed a jab from Clinton about using her husband’s former advisers and responded with a devastating one-liner of his own: “Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.”
For a man known as a powerful speaker, Obama has rarely wowed people in political debates. He can come across as lifeless, aloof and windy.
But Obama didn’t make any serious mistakes in the many debates during the Democratic primary, or when he was running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He sometimes showed flashes of wit and charm. And, with a couple of exceptions, he got better with time.
“A year ago, he was not nearly as polished,” said Timothy O’Donnell, a professor at the University of Mary Washington and chairman of the collegiate National Debate Tournament. “He equivocates less. He’s quicker with examples.”
O’Donnell says staying on offense will be key if Obama wants to shape the discussion and reach undecided voters.
The problem for Obama and McCain: he who is most strongly on the offense will likely be hit with a carefully-prepared “spontaneous” rejoinder zinger that’ll be played over and over in future news cycles.
McCain, on the other hand, didn’t have debates that seemed as widely-panned as some of Obama’s. In some events, McCain was even deemed too aggressive.
At the same time, both candidates need keep in mind the lesson of then-Vice President Al Gore who seemed to show up for various debates in 2000 with not only a different make-up “artist” (in one of them, Gore looked as if his makeup had been applied by am over-caffeinated mime) but different personas.
McCain’s goal: get across his experience, grasp of issues and solidity. Obama’s problem: close the sale- unclosed so far since many Americans consider him a still risky commodity and wonder if McCain and GOpers are correct in suggesting that he is basically a flashy but empty suit.
And you’ve got to do it all, you guys, just being yourselves…
Cartoon by Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com
NOTE: An earlier version of this mistakenly said the debate was in Alabama, instead of Mississippi. TMV regrets the error.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.