Winning isn’t enough. To gain from a presidential debate, there must be sound bites that appear on TV day after day and show your opponent in an unfavorable or embarrassing light. John McCain was better than Barack Obama in their first presidential debate last night. But the debate produced no knockout sound bites–none I noticed anyway–that might harm Obama’s campaign. So McCain’s win isn’t likely to affect the presidential race.
That’s unfair, but politics is often unfair. McCain was far more forceful and aggressive than expected. And he had Obama on the defensive for roughly an hour of the 90-minute debate. But that doesn’t matter much since Obama was never rattled and made no obvious blunders.
I concluded that mere winning doesn’t count for much in presidential debates, while sound bites do, after participating as a questioner in 1984 in the first debate between President Reagan and Walter Mondale. It was the best night of Mondale’s entire political career and Reagan often stammered and occasionally looked flustered.
But the effect on the race was nil. Why? Because as bad as Reagan was in the debate, no memorable or damaging sound bites emerged. Reagan escaped, and in the second debate recovered effectively with a quip about Mondale’s youth and inexperience.
In contrast, consider the debates that produced real losers. The first President Bush was caught looking at his watch at a 1992 town hall debate as if he couldn’t wait for the ordeal to end. That bite was broadcast over and over. Bush lost the election. And in 1980, Reagan had several great zingers that made President Carter look bad. They lingered on television for days afterwards, helping Reagan defeat Carter.
There are other examples of debate blunders: President Ford freeing Poland from Soviet domination in 1976, Al Gore sighing loudly in 2000, and Mike Dukakis in 1988 responding matter of factly to a hypothetical question about his wife’s being raped. All were captured in sound bites. All three candidates lost.
As best I could tell, Obama carefully avoided any such embarrassing moments. He had his problems answering McCain’s relentless attacks on his supposed naivete on foreign policy and national security. But he showed no signs of being ruffled or agitated. His self-discipline was apparent, as it has been throughout the campaign. For a first-time presidential candidate, Obama has made few mistakes, and those he has made were inconsequential.
McCain benefited from being both folksy and substantive in the debate. He loves to throw out stray factoids, such as North Koreans being 3 inches shorter than South Koreans. Obama was merely substantive. Folksy isn’t part of his makeup.
I expected McCain to make a strong case for having suspended his campaign and rushed to Washington to join the deliberations over a bailout for faltering financial institutions. He didn’t. Rather, he steered the discussion away from the financial crisis onto a stronger issue for him, the need for spending cuts and an end to earmarks.
It wasn’t a commanding performance, but it was a pretty good one for McCain. However, Obama had an easier task, a lower threshold to meet. He has a small but significant lead over McCain. To protect his lead, all he had to do was not make a serious mistake usable for sound bite purposes. Obama managed that task quite well.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
