Spinning W.'s L

(continued)

by Dan Kennedy

Yet if the public's inattention to politics helped Bush during the debate, he also failed pretty miserably when it came to exploiting that reality. Gore, knowing that he was reaching a far bigger audience than he did in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, recycled his best lines - the ones about not being an exciting politician, about being willing to fight, and the like. No doubt he would have arranged to French-kiss Tipper again if he could have. By contrast, Bush delivered a flat closing statement that drew nothing from his own effective convention speech. What's more, in talking about education (an area in which he actually did okay, sort of), Bush never used a phrase he has repeated countless times, to much smaller audiences, during the campaign - "the soft bigotry of low expectations," which is a wonderfully lyrical way of charging liberals with hurting minority kids by not holding them to high standards; never mind whether it's true or not. Bush also let Gore invoke the still-popular John McCain's name so frequently it was beginning to look like McCain had supplanted Joe Lieberman on the Democratic ticket. You might think Bush would have had the wit to work in, at least once, the news that McCain has endorsed him. Apparently not.

Of course, the way Gore-Bush I is perceived could change over the next few days. In Northeastern University journalism professor Alan Schroeder's new book, Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV (Columbia University Press), Washington Post political reporter David Broder talks about the key moments of past debates - and about how surprised he's often been by what those moments turn out to be, such as Ronald Reagan telling Jimmy Carter "There you go again," or George Bush Sr. looking at his watch. His point was that the key moments are not always apparent at the time but, rather, often take a day or two to congeal. At this writing - about 6 a.m. on Wednesday - it may still be too soon to tell.

Maybe, if we're lucky, the spin will settle on what the candidates actually said. My favorite post-debate media sighting was something called "Debate Referee," on WashingtonPost.com. Inserted into the text of the debate was a series of hyperlinks; when you clicked, you received a short explanation by Charles Babington showing exactly how someone had strayed from the truth. For instance, Babington noted that Gore, despite his denials during the debate's opening moments, really had questioned Bush's experience in an interview with the New York Times; and that when Bush claimed he would not favor ordering the Food and Drug Administration to revisit its approval of the abortion pill RU-486, he was contradicting a position his spokesman had articulated just several days earlier. Now there's some useful debate spin. (MSNBC did something similar but less thorough, with Lisa Myers heading up the "Truth Squad.")

It's more likely, though, that the Broder moment will turn out to be something unimportant, even ridiculous. My nominee: Gore's heavy breathing. During the debate, I heard someone take a breath on several occasions. I didn't think anything of it, and I certainly gave no thought to who it might be. Yet those infernal focus groups settled on that as evidence that Gore was being disrespectful and overly aggressive. Brian Williams laughed at the absurdity of it, yet saw fit to mention it several times.

For the media, it would be the perfect outcome to a debate they don't seem to know how to evaluate: take a guy who battered his opponent on the issues for 90 minutes and pronounce him the loser because he sighed in exasperation.

Now that's what I would call fuzzy math.

Watch bostonphoenix.com on Friday morning for an analysis of the vice-presidential debate between Democrat Joe Lieberman and Republican Dick Cheney.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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