Debate prep casts doubt about the cop-on of Obama and his team

IT DOESN’T reach quite the readership of Time, but The New Yorker magazine matters, too.

In fact, the cover of The New Yorker can be enormously important to political figures. In the run-up to the last presidential election, the magazine ran a cover cartoon of Michelle and Barack Obama which infuriated the Democrats and mortified not a few Republicans.

The cartoonist portrayed the two figures in the oval office of the White House, Obama wearing Muslim white robes and headgear, Michelle looking like a latter-day Angela Davis with Afro hair, submachine gun slung over her shoulder, combat boots, giving her husband a fist bump. It may have been intended as liberal satire, but instead played into all the stereotypes about the Obamas. “Tasteless and offensive,” was how the Democrat campaign described Barry Blitt’s cartoon at the time.

This week, Blitt’s done it again. The edition of the magazine currently shipping to bookstores and convenience stores all over America carries his brutal interpretation of the first presidential debate. On the right of the picture is Mitt Romney, hand raised in exposition as he stands at a podium. On the left? On the left is a podium. And a chair. And that’s it. The message is clear: the president was absent for the entire encounter. He may have shown up physically, but that was about it. He looked — as he has looked in one public appearance after another — as if he was doing sums in his head. Or had a much more important and interesting place to be than at the podium. If he was an actor, you’d say he’d “phoned in” his performance.

The picture of the empty chair sums it all up, visually. And may be about as effective in doing damage to the Obama campaign as was his cartoon of the Obamas as semi- terrorists, last time around. The man’s chances of retaining his office will not be seriously impacted by that performance, however emotionally absent and rambling it was. Even setting aside the solid core vote he retains, Obama has roped in a number of key demographics in the last year which greatly improve his electoral position. His move to ease the plight of undocumented Hispanics has vastly enhanced his standing with a rapidly growing section of the voting public. The same is true of his abolition of Clinton’s “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” rule about gays in the military. His numbers, his states and his funding stack up, and continue to stack up, despite the consensus that he lost the first TV debate.

Obama diehards like Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman will brush aside one debate, or even more than one debate, pointing instead to what they believe to be the unacknowledged but massive achievements of the Obama administration on the economic, employment and national security fronts. Not all disappointed Democrats will accept the arguments of Krugman and others, but they will still vote for the incumbent. They’d rather saw their own ears off than cross over to Romney.

In short, that chair could stay empty and — barring some more major disaster — Obama would still make it back to the White House. In which context, the “wake-up call” analogy constantly applied to the debate may not have quite the power it should have. If you’re going to get the job anyway, why spend a lot of time preparing for the interview? Short answer? Two reasons.

THE word is that Obama rehearsed unwillingly and minimally for the first debate. The reality is that he also rehearsed in precisely the wrong way. His team freighted in John Kerry to pretend to be Mitt Romney. Now, this lark of someone else pretending to be the opposing candidate has limitations, at the best of times. It tends to reverse the candidate being coached into a responder, rather than a leader, because the emphasis is on what he’ll say to this accusation or that assertion, rather than on how he can rouse the viewers to believe what he believes, see that he’s the solution to their problems, and prove himself to be the front man, rather than the one doing an oral exam with the questions set by the other side.

A step further down the wrong path was the selection of John Kerry to play Mitt Romney in the rehearsals. That choice was so crazy, it creates doubt about the cop-on of the campaign. Or about the cop-on of the president. Maybe he didn’t want to rehearse with anyone other than a party grandee, for reasons of dignity or confidentiality or whatever. It’s still crazy. Someone in their thirties with a magpie mind could learn everything Mitt Romney has ever said and extrapolate from it what he might say, while doing a creditable performance of his personality. But a 69 year old steeped in Democratic thought since he was in short pants? Whose formative experience and frame of reference is military, rather than business? A Catholic letting on to be a Mormon? One can only imagine how bored the president must have been, doing a mock debate against such an opponent — and how the experience would have painted him further into the disengaged, cerebral, “No Drama Obama” corner.

If Obama is to trounce Mitt Romney, next time around, the preparation must be radically different. No John Kerry. No advisors who are afraid to tackle their president and point out to him that he could be as languid and verbose as he wanted, last time around. Not just because he was initially up against a woman with a high dislikeability factor and then up against an old man trying to overcome physical problems and a campaign skewed beyond reason by its importation of Sarah Palin. Last time around, Obama was the fresh face. The embodiment of hope. The magnet attracting the projected dreams of others.

This time, he is in a very different place. He is a shrunken, aged, wearied, unenthusiastic reminder of what he was, less than half a decade ago. And here’s the important point. While television is a poor medium when it comes to delivering content, it’s a superb medium for conveying engagement, energy, commitment, passion. The TV camera, like an electronic animal, seeks out those traits, and in Obama, this time around, it fails to find them. It fails to find the characteristics of a leader, and instead, picks up the characteristics of a manager who’s irritated that nobody appreciated how well he’s handled complex problems.

America is not re-electing a high-level manager. It is electing much more than that. It is electing someone in whom it believes. Someone who — first and foremost, before he gets to address the issues affecting the electorate, respects the electorate. The behaviour of a candidate in a debate, is taken by viewers as the outward and visible manifestation of internal realities, and Obama’s performance suggested an internal reality of “Don’t bother me with the humanity. I’m taking care of the details”.

Even if the debate does not endanger his prospects of re-election, Obama needs to up his game next time around — if only out of simple respect for those he wants to continue to lead.