Jamison Foser

Photos: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band in Charlottesville

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

Charlottesville, VA

October 23, 2012

The Real Lesson of the Clinton-Bush Town Hall Debate

There’s an unwritten rule among political reporters and pundits: When talking about town hall-style debates, you must use the 1992 debate in Richmond between Bill Clinton and incumbent President George H. W. Bush as an example of the importance of “connecting” with the audience. The consensus is that Clinton did a better job of relating to and empathizing with the audience; that the delivery of his responses was more effective than Bush’s. That’s almost certainly true.

But I’ve always thought the key lesson from that debate is something nobody ever mentions. Here’s the exchange everyone always points to:

 

The audience member asks Bush how the “national debt” has effected him personally. Bush rather obviously doesn’t understand what she means. He talks about interest rates and abstractions. Then it’s Clinton’s turn, and he recognizes that when the questioner asked about the “national debt,” she really meant the poor economy.* So he talked about factories closing, people losing jobs and unable to afford health care, declining wages, people “working harder for less money than they were ten years ago,” and so on.

Clinton’s answer was better not just because it was stylistically better, but because he addressed voters’ real concerns rather than the precise word the questioner used. People don’t really care about deficits. They think they do, because the political and media elite can’t stop obsessing over deficits, so it’s a word voters know. But when they use it, they’re using it as a proxy for other things. That’s the lesson politicians and the media should’ve learned from the 1992 debate, if they didn’t already know it. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Even Clinton’s fellow Democrats -- and probably Clinton himself at this point -- see polls showing public concern about deficits and conclude that they have to focus on deficits. But it’s the economy people are worried about, and their own financial condition. Help improve that, and voters’ concerns about deficits will disappear, even if deficits continue. Conversely, you could balance the budget next year and nobody would be happy if their economic condition didn’t improve. (Which wouldn’t happen, given what would be necessary to balance the budget that quickly.)

* As Bush was fumbling his way through an answer, debate moderator Carole Simpson interjected “I think she means more the recession, the economic problems the country faces today rather than the deficit.” Simpson deserves credit for that. Sadly, it’s hard to imagine a debate moderator like Jim Lehrer or Candy Crowley doing something like that today; if anything, they’d be more likely to “translate” an audience question about the economy into something about deficit reduction. We’ll never know for certain whether Clinton would’ve recognized the questioner’s intent without Simpson’s clarification, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet he would have.

Joe Biden's Laugh And What Really Happened When Gore Sighed

Here’s something you probably don’t know: Viewers of the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George W Bush in 2000 thought Gore won. Here’s Bob Somerby’s summary of the polls conducted immediately after the debate (emphasis added):

In fact, instant polls of viewers credited Gore with a rather decisive win. How substantial was Gore’s apparent success? According to NBC’s post-debate poll, 46 percent said Gore had won, 36 percent picked Bush. At CBS, the margin was wider; it was Gore, 56-42. CNN had a seven-point spread, 48-41. Only ABC had it close; in their survey, 42 percent picked Gore, 39 percent favored Bush. (For the record, more Bush voters watched the debate. Gore won the instant polls anyway.) Adding to the unanimous verdict, Time polled viewers on October 4-5, the first two days post-debate; their sample picked Gore, 51-37. In fact, Gore “won the debate” in these five polls by an average margin of 9.6 percent. In these, the five major instant polls, Gore “won” by a serious margin.

But after the debate, reporters and pundits -- driven by their transparent dislike of Gore and egged on by the Bush campaign -- began obsessing over Al Gore’s debate body language. He sighed too much, they said -- and they said it over and over again, playing clips of Gore sighs that hadn’t bothered debate watchers in real time. They devoted far more attention and contempt to Gore’s supposed theatrics than to, for example, Bush’s obvious lies about his tax plan. In doing so, they turned Gore’s debate win into a loss by telling those who hadn’t watched that Gore had behaved boorishly -- and eventually convincing many of those who had watched of the same thing. (Here’s George Washington political scientist John Sides explaining how that works.)

That’s how, to this day, “Gore lost the first debate by sighing” is conventional wisdom. Everybody thinks debate viewers recoiled at Gore’s inappropriate behavior. But it just isn’t what happened. What happened was a media mugging of Al Gore. And, it is important to understand, the primary culprits weren’t FOX News and Rush Limbaugh; it was CNN and MSNBC and the Washington Post and the rest of the so-called “mainstream” media.

Now: This is exactly what is happening to Joe Biden. The CBS poll conducted immediately after last night’s Vice Presidential debate gave Biden a comfortable win. CNN’s poll found viewers pretty evenly split, with Ryan holding a four point edge in a poll with a 5.5 point margin of error and a debate sample CNN says skewed Republican. But even before the debate was over, the media -- again, I’m not talking about FOX and Limbaugh, I’m talking about the supposedly-neutral “mainstream” media -- pounced on Biden, claiming his body language in reaction to Paul Ryan’s comments was inappropriate and cost him the debate. Here’s a representative sample of the nonsense.

Notice how the attacks on Biden’s demeanor were framed: It’s Gore’s sighing all over again! The article doesn’t mention, of course, that Gore won the debate in question. Nor did any of the countless reporters and pundits making that comparison last night and this morning. When they compare Biden’s laughter to Gore’s sighs, they mean “Candidate’s body language turns off voters, losing the debate.” But remember: That isn’t what actually happened in 2000, and it isn’t what happened last night. Viewers thought Gore won in 2000. They thought Biden won last night. The media, pundits & Republicans then peddled a bunch of nonsense about Gore sighing to turn his win into a loss -- just like they’re doing to Biden now. Only this time around, they point to a precedent: Gore’s sighs. That’s a precedent, all right -- but for their behavior, not Biden’s.

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Just for the record: The notion that it’s rude to laugh or smirk at an opponent’s misleading statements is absurd. It’s rude to make misleading statements. The fact that the news media doesn’t see it this way tells you a great deal. It’s why, for example, politicians are able to go on television and lie to millions of viewers: They know the journalist interviewing them won’t take offense at being lied to and won’t call them on it.

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Also for the record: There is absolutely no value in Gloria Borger or David Gergen or Wolf Blitzer or whoever speculating about candidates demeanor or the “effectiveness” of their performance. Viewers can assess body language, demeanor and tone on their own; they don’t need to be -- and shouldn’t be -- told how to respond to such things. They need help understanding the issues, figuring out which things were true and which were false; which policies are likely to work and which are likely to fail. That’s how the news media can bring value to their audience. That’s what voters need, not circular speculation about how performances will “play” or who “won.” It’s the public’s job to decide those things, not the media’s.

Jobs

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today that the nation’s unemployment rate has fallen to 7.8 percent, the lowest since January 2009. And unlike many/most of the monthly BLS reports in recent years that showed a drop in the overall rate along with several mitigating factors (a decline in the participation rate, for example) this report appears to be good news across the board, or nearly so.*

The bad news is that 7.8 percent is still really high. We have a long way to go before anyone should be happy about the jobs situation.

When the new number came out this morning, nearly every liberal I follow on Twitter, and many of the journalists, made the same political point: There goes the Republicans “X consecutive months of 8 percent unemployment” talking point. That’s an unsurprising reaction; Mitt Romney and Republicans have been using that line a lot, and the new number does step on it, even though “X months of 7.5 percent unemployment” is pretty bad, too.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I have been talking about “consecutive months of 8 percent unemployment” longer than Mitt Romney and the Republicans. That’s because 8 percent unemployment is really high, and we had it for a really long time. Here’s a November 2010 post in which I noted that economists expected we’d have 46 consecutive months of at least 8 percent unemployment by election day 2012 -- more than the total number of months above 8 between 1948 and 2008. Here’s a follow-up a couple of weeks later, about the political and media establishment paying insufficient attention to this unemployment crisis. The key passage:

It is insane, but it is not surprising. The rapid acceptance by the political/media class of extraordinary circumstances is one of the key developments of the past ten years. Remember when people only seemed to talk about the two wars we were fighting when they wanted to send more people to fight in them? How the media had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to cover evidence that one of those wars was based on a series of lies? Remember how each new aspect of the Bush administration’s expansion of executive power -- complete with warrantless wiretapping of Americans, indefinite detention, torture, etc -- got an initial flurry of attention, then everyone just kind of moved on? One of the defining characteristics of the past decade has been the tendency of both pols and journalists to pay scant attention to things that should be huge stories. We’re fighting simultaneous wars? We torture people? Spy on Americans without court permission? Eh. That’s just how things are now.

So it really isn’t surprising that a catastrophically bad economy has been accepted as the new normal, too.

[…]

If the economic forecasts are right, we’re going to have more months of the unemployment rate higher than 8 percent (and 9 percent) in four years than we did in the previous 61. From 1948-1968, a 7 percent unemployment rate was pretty bad -- it happened in less than 20 percent of those 732 months. Now we’re looking at four consecutive years above 8 percent unemployment; nearly three straight above 9. And it often seems politicians and the media would rather focus on anything else.

The unemployment situation has been really, really awful for a really, really long time. People don’t like to admit it when their preferred political party controls the White House, but it’s true. I’m glad Republicans finally started talking about it, even if they were motivated by politics rather than sincere interest in helping create jobs. Democrats should’ve been talking about it, too. The problem isn’t the GOP’s talking point. The problem is the Republicans deserve a massive amount of the blame for creating the lousy economic situation in the first place, did everything they could to thwart efforts to fix it in the second place, and, if given the chance, will screw things up again in the third place.

The unemployment situation has been really, really awful for a really, really long time. It’s still awful. And that’s only one of the ways our economy is fundamentally broken for most people who don’t have the good fortune to be quarter-billionaires who overcame the hardships of being the son of a wealthy industrialist governor, like Mitt Romney. You should blame, mock, vote against, and generally feel contempt for Mitt Romney and the Republicans, because they’ll make things worse so they can make life marginally easier for millionaires who already have it so good they won’t even notice. But don’t blame them for talking about high unemployment. Everyone should have been doing that all along.

* I’m not an economist. Please don’t rely on me for serious economic analysis.