It usually puzzles me that anyone can still be undecided this close to Election Day. But, after watching last week’s debates, I feel their pain.
Believe me, after hearing stump speeches for more than a year, I’m ready to vote. I want it all to be over.
Meanwhile, about 10 percent of the voters seem to be just getting started. With the polling so close they’re the ones who are going to make the difference, especially in the big, crucial, still-undecided “battleground” states.
So you can imagine my dismay when the early polling after the first presidential debate between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush showed a virtual dead heat. No change from the previous day. The voters were about evenly split before and afterwards, much to the astonishment of ABC’s Ted Koppel and numerous other news anchors.
Who, I wondered, are these undecideds? They seem to fall into three big categories: There are the phony undecideds who just love to lie to pollsters. There are the chronically undecideds who can’t make up their minds about anything. You can see them standing in supermarket checkout lines responding with complete puzzlement to the question “Paper or plastic?” Finally, there are the reluctant undecideds. These are the folks who like a candidate’s programs and ideas better than they like the candidate who is expressing them. This group seems to be unusually large this year, especially after the first presidential debate.
The winner? Forget it. On this debate, I, too, became an undecided.
If ever I saw a draw, this was it. It reminded me in an unflattering way of the debates some of us who did not make the football team used to hold back in high school. By those time-honored standards, Gore beat Bush “on points,” as we used to say. But, as a wise, old political saying says, it is one thing to win an argument, it is quite another to win an election.
Gore won the argument, it seemed to me, but stepped on his own message in the way he argued. Like a star high school debater who comes heavily armed with a big box of index cards, Gore seemed to relish smothering his opponent in a haze of statistics. Bush, by contrast, looked and sounded surprisingly nervous and unsure of himself, especially near the beginning. He looked and sounded like the high school kid who had crammed for all of this in a late-nighter on the previous evening, only to have most of the information spill out of his head by morning.
But rather than risk losing himself and his audience in more statistics, Bush left the details to his surrogates to argue later.
For example, Gore blasted the way Bush’s tax cut would “spend” more in a give-back to the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers than Bush would spend on education, prescription drugs and national defense combined. Bush could have argued that Gore was inflating his cost estimate–$665 billion–a bit by including the extra interest that would be incurred by failure to pay down the debt the way Gore wanted to. Gore also was including the estate tax relief Bush wants–relief that also would go mainly to the rich, Gore could argue.
But Bush didn’t take the risk of losing himself–and his audience–in numbers. He ridiculed Gore’s numbers as “fuzzy math,” without venturing to explain why they were fuzzy. Instead of numbers, Bush came armed with charm, like the guy from everybody’s class who was fun to be around precisely because he was not a visible genius. He was a regular guy who posed no threat. You felt you could count on him to be on your side.
Meanwhile, the students who most resembled Gore in the classroom were smart and always wanted everybody to know it, especially the teacher. You were impressed by their intelligence, all right, in the way that you were impressed by leprosy.
Gore’s audible sighs while Bush struggled along did not help matters. They sounded annoyingly like condescending snorts, as if Gore was a race horse who couldn’t wait to get back on the track.
By contrast, the calm and thoughtful debate conducted by their running mates, Republican Dick Cheney and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), Thursday looked like a lively think-tank seminar. These two brainy, confident and inspiring gentlemen actually covered a wide range of issues and argued each one thoughtfully. It was the sort of experience independent swing voters say they love to hear.
Yes, issues matter, but so does one’s ability to argue them. Two essential elements of leadership are knowledge and the ability to express it in a way that wins the trust and confidence of others. In that sense, Gore and Bush each seemed to offer half of a great president. Which is what made the vice presidential debate so reassuring.
No matter who wins, it was reassuring to know that, in a crisis, Bush could turn to Cheney for help and Gore could turn to Lieberman for some humility.
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