Why Obama lost the debate (Doug Henwood)

[White Cloud]

I know that I'm in the minority on this, but I disagree with the widely-held premise that has developed post-debate that President Obama "lost" the debate. I know that this narrative has so taken hold that 40 years from now, it will probably be written about in history books as "Obama's horrible debate performance", but I have to interject here and say that I, for one, did not perceive the debate this way at all. I'm someone who is not "plugged in" to social media or the 24-7 cable news nonsense. I don't use social media. I don't even watch television. So that's where I'm coming from on this.

I watched the debate online, without any pre-debate or post-debate analysis from the talking heads who shape our opinions on these things. I watched the debate and thought that neither candidate won. I didn't think that it was a good or bad debate for either candidate, for the most part. To me, both candidates were fairly respectful of one another and the debate was largely uneventful. President Obama said the same things that he has been saying for the past four years. He didn't change his message. Mitt Romney promised a bunch of things that he will not deliver on, and is good at delivering canned, rehearsed lines in a way that appears to not be rehearsed (I don't consider that to be a good thing, by the way, I'm essentially saying that he's good at manipulating people).

I watched the debate without any influence from the talking heads, without seeing the candidates on high-definition TV, and came away thinking that neither candidate won. I honestly thought that, just based on appearances, that Mitt Romney looked kind of sickly and tired. While watching the debate, I thought that the media angle in the post-debate analysis would be about how sickly and tired Mitt Romney looked. Then I go online the next morning to check some news sites, and the whole thing is about how horrible President Obama did in the debate. It's just bizarre to me. I think it has to do with the media feedback loop and how the candidates looked on high-definition TV screens.

People are really very stupid when you get down to it. We are very influenced by appearances and superficialities, plus we follow the herd mentality. I saw a photo of the debate scene and noticed that Romney appeared to be slightly taller than Obama (this wasn't really apparent while watching online, but it might have been more apparent on TV). Romney projected "confidence" to the viewing audience by being slightly taller than Obama and by "looking at Obama more often than Obama looked at him" (I got that from a news "analysis" where it was remarked about how much Obama "looked down" during the debate, as if this is a valid reason to choose a candidate).

By superficially appearing to be more "confident" (kind of like a "confidence man" or "con man"?), Romney activated that part in the viewing audience's primitive brains that desires to be led by the "alpha male". Up until this point, Romney, in spite of his massive wealth and (somewhat) handsome appearance, had not been able to establish his "alpha status". I suspect that this came across much stronger on high-definition TVs than it did on grainy internet feeds like the one that I used to watch the debate.

But the bottom line is that based on what the candidates said, and not how they APPEARED, President Obama reaffirmed what he has been saying all along and did not change his message, and for that, I respect his position and his consistency. Romney, on the other hand, promised a bunch of things that he will not follow through on, and said things that are not logical or believable, like saying that he will cut the deficit without raising taxes and without cutting Medicare, but how? By cutting PBS. Yeah, right.