News anchors were flustered last night when focus groups handed yet another debate victory to Barack Obama. Wasn’t John McCain forceful? Didn’t he make his case? Didn’t he confront Obama about William Ayers? Wasn’t that a good line about running against George Bush? (It was.)
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Ronald Reagan was perhaps the first president to utilize the television medium effectively. He was a master – the fact that he was first an actor made politics a cinch for him. He projected warmth and sincerity. He was the Roy Hobbs of politics – The Natural.
When we watch TV, two streams are coming at us – audio and visual. But the audio is secondary. We can filter words, but images control. They go straight to our brains unfiltered. John McCain keeps losing these debates because he fidgets, looks angry, rolls his eyes, and has kind of a goofy smile. Obama, on the other hand, is calm and collected. He could be reading the phone book – he’d still win.
Each debate is free advertising for Obama – he projects intelligence, warmth, sincerity, calmness. Maybe he is none of those things. It doesn’t matter. All he has to do is show up. When news anchors throw up their hands in frustration over McCain’s inability to win a debate, they’re letting on that they don’t understand their own medium. But news anchors are basically actors, like Reagan. They ought to understand this debate business better than they do.
Then there’s FOX News. It’s an angry network, and must have an angry audience. Interviews are contentious, people constantly talk over one another. It’s news anchors are openly partisan. The network averages about eight million viewers, but is pretty much stuck at that number. The rest of us have been exposed to it and steer clear.
FOX viewers are likely the partisans that flock to debates and yell angry words at speakers. FOX keeps these people in constant agitation, as do Limbaugh and the other talkers. These are the people who were urging McCain to show his fire, to get angry, to confront Obama.
They’ve had their way now. McCain got angry, confronted Obama. And he got his hat handed him. And Obama did it with a calm smile. It appears that Obama, like Reagan before him, understands the medium and how to use it.
McCain is not TV material. He’s a bad actor. He’ll never “win” a debate.
Piece of Mindful 
Damn straight Mark…He will NEVER win a debate because he is his own worst enemy! Worse, he has listened to his handlers who seem to think that “real” people are stupid and need to be lead down the road and that without their insights they would be lost….Lemmings comes to mind 😉
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I noticed a report before last night’s debate between Barack Obama and John McCain that each campaign required that an air conditioning vent be placed above their candidate to counteract the natural reaction of the human body to hot television lights. Why? In the first television debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, the lights and cameras destroyed Nixon while the same enhanced JFK. The first of four Kennedy-Nixon “debates” was a great lesson in “selling the sizzle, not the steak.”
Nixon had a naturally heavy beard, and it was magnified by the lights and cameras. He perspired profusely, his upper lip looking as though he was constantly resupplying moisture to his face through his nose. Nixon’s 5 o’clock shadow as a backdrop to his streaming perspiration, compared with Kennedy’s television “cool” made the “winner” obvious to those who watched this first-time-ever television “presidential” spectacle.
Obama is now “cool,” McCain is “hot,” and Sarah Palin is “Tina Fey.” The beat goes on….
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