2008 Election

Punditocracy Gets Debate Wrong?

By Maegan Carberry ⋅ September 29, 2008 ⋅   Email this post ⋅  Digg This ⋅  Share on Facebook ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Greg Mitchell ponders: If John McCain won Friday’s debate, as the pundits (including me) proclaimed, then why did Obama get the bounce? 

“… many pundits threw out the window what they, and others, had said beforehand, about Obama needing to appear presidential and seem expert on international matters. When he did just that in the debate, they suddenly forgot the importance they had placed on it beforehand.

But here’s the key to the viewer/pundit disparity. It took awhile for McCain to build up to it, but then he hammered it home near the end: Obama, he charged, lacked the ‘knowledge and experience’ to be president.

Pundits highlighted that and said it was the key to McCain gaining at least a tie. But I didn’t hear a single person on TV point out: McCain just picked Palin for vice president! How, then, could he make such a charge against Obama?

My feeling is that the Couric interview might have done for McCain what the first Nixon-Kennedy debate did for Nixon in 1960 — a true watershed moment. The American voters finally ‘got it’ about Palin and so McCain’s ‘best moment’ against Obama either fell flat with many of them, or proved laughable. This was made all the more stark with Palin AWOL during the post-debate analysis — and Joe Biden all over the place.”

It’s a strong point, but if you measure the candidates’ performances based on their individual ability level and expectations, I still believe John McCain was on his A game and Obama brought a B-. It’s not enough that BO got a small bump in the polls with undecided voters (and I don’t pay much heed to polling data anyway). It’s that he could have clobbered McCain decisively and sparked a major momentum shift in the election. It’s still way too close for comfort, and that’s not a victory in my book.