Six ways to spot the over-prepped debater

IF, the day after tomorrow, people can quote something either of the two leaders said tonight, that’s a major victory.

Because television is a great impressions medium and a rotten medium when it comes to delivering data that people remember.

Secondly, if individual floating voters feel an emotional connection with one of the leaders, that’s also a victory.

The problem is that the way politicians tend to be coached for Big Debates is by large teams of policy experts — nerds, in other words — who think a Big Debate is an oral exam, in which their man must prove he knows the most obscure statistics about every economy, every bailout and every healthcare system in the world. So they cram their candidate full of data and get them to feed it back until they have learned it by heart.

This kind of preparation tends to serve the interests of media observers, who sit there with their computers on their laps, marking on a score sheet. They have a completely different mindset to the people the debate sets out to influence: civilians who want the programme to be interesting, understandable and memorable, and who almost never find it delivering on any of the three.

Over-coaching of politicians tends to show up in six predictable ways.

1) The glazed look

This happens when the candidate has the distinctive, inner-directed expression of someone trying to remember the fantastic statistic someone told them to produce. It’s easy to spot. The individual looks as if they’re trying to read off an internal autocue.

2) Physical rigidity

This results from being told your body language is bad. Bad body language, for television, includes pointing at other debaters. But whether the candidate uses their hands a little or a lot, it tends to mean nothing more than that they’re nervous — as they should be. Other obvious signs of nerves are poking a finger inside a shirt collar and fidgeting. The problem is that body language is a symptom, and focusing on it falsifies the entire performance. Debaters need to concentrate on content and on reaching the floating voter.

3) Repetition of learned-off phrases

Where the candidate is effectively reading from someone else’s script, their own thought processes are over-ridden by the need to deliver killer blows from that script. So they repeatedly seek the comfort of delivering the same killer blow more than once. And look smug when they succeed.

4) Failure to listen

This has sunk more than one party leader. I once warned Charles Haughey that he would lose a debate if he didn’t listen, because he would end up conveying the impression that he was evading questions he was perfectly competent to answer. That’s precisely what happened. The problem is that when you’re stuffed with material you feel you must get said, you forget that you’re not in the business of vomiting data. You’re in the business of communication.

5) Forgetting the real audience

Some leaders abandon the voting public, talking instead to media. Some leaders articulate lots of points of interest to their party faithful. Big mistake. Whoever wins tonight will talk to the floating voter: the person whose mind might be changed.

6) Conceptual language

Interesting people give examples or tell stories to illustrate concepts. The leader, who, tonight gets bogged down in GDP, GNP, or in the details of possible negotiations with the IMF or the ECB, won’t say anything that will influence human beings or stay in their memories on polling day.