If the title of this post is unequivocal and definitive, it is offered in the spirit and style of the American mass media punditocracy. No sooner was the debate on Tuesday over than commentators and bloggers were pontificating not only about Obama taking a beating, as one commentator on MSNBC put it, but also about how the sorts of inane questions ABC's George Stephanopolous and Charlie Gibson posed during the first 45 minutes of the debate were actually vitally important and highly relevant.
As a paradigmatic case, take David Brooks'
column from today's NYT: although Brooks has a point about how inadvisable it is to make absolute pledges about complex issues like the war or tax increases, he goes astray when he defends Gibson and Stephanopolous this way:
Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News are taking a lot of heat for spending so much time asking about Jeremiah Wright and the “bitter” comments. But the fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences.
In his commentary this afternoon on
NPR, Brooks went yet further saying that the reason the Democrats have not been able to win the last few elections is because "people were not convinced that the Democratic candidate lives the kind of life they lead." He goes on to suggest that high school educated white voters do not want to vote for a Harvard educated lawyer who bowls a 37.
Ironically, this is precisely the sort of elitist and condescending analysis Brooks himself so likes to associate with those of us in the academy. My sense, which is admittedly largely informed by what I see around me here in a small college town in the center of Pennsylvania, is that the debate will largely help Obama because people are fed up with the sort of immature, gotcha politics on which the main stream media thrives.
Here, E.J. Dionne's analysis is more accurate: Obama may be one of the first Democrats to actually win something significant -- like PA and thus the nomination -- by running against the media.
He started to do this already in the debate when he pivoted from Stephanopolous's inane question about whether Obama thought Rev. Wright "loves American as much as you do" (who comes up with this stuff and how does it get on national television?!). Obama responded by trying to shift the focus back to the important issues the country is facing, saying:
And I have confidence in the American people that when you talk to the American people honestly and directly about what I believe in, what my plans are on health care, on energy, when they see my track record of the work that I've done on behalf of people who really need help, I have absolute confidence that they can rally behind my campaign.
At another point, again responding to Stephanopolous, who was pressing Obama about his campaign's questioning Clinton's credibility, Obama tried to shift the focus to issues of substance, saying:
I think what's important is to make sure that we don't get so obsessed with gaffes that we lose sight of the fact that this is a defining moment in our history. We are going to be tackling some of the biggest issues that any president has dealt with in the last 40 years. Our economy is teetering not just on the edge of recession, but potentially worse. Our foreign policy is in a shambles. We are involved in two wars. People's incomes have not gone up, and their costs have. And we're seeing greater income inequality now than any time since the 1920s.
My sense is that people, whatever their level of education, will embrace the maturity of Obama's politics. They will vote for him not because he is like them, but because he has his eyes on the prize and has the talent to make substantive changes to the way American politics and policy is pursued.
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