THE LOW POST: Observations About the First Democratic Debate

2) The "campaign as screenplay" form of political journalism is here to stay.

We've all seen these movies -- you know, the ones written by those hacks who go to five-step screenplay-writing schools. Every character has to have an "arc," and the arc moves from idyllic if uneasy stasis in the beginning of the film to chaos and an upset equilibrium in the middle to triumph and a satisfying resolution in the end. Cop made gunshy after losing his partner in a shootout flies a desk in the beginning of the film; he is plunged into a scary hostage crisis in the middle, his daughter's life hanging in the balance; in the end, he overcomes his fears and shoots the bad guy, saving the day. You know -- the Die Hard model. Similarly, the networks, always anxious to find a way to sell the campaign to casual viewers, have become expert at turning the race into a movie in which each of the candidates is forced to heroically overcome a flaw. The Orangeburg moderator Brian Williams put it this way, at the beginning of the debate:

WILLIAMS: We enter now the second phase of tonight's conversation. The in-house title for these questions was, Elephants in the Room, according to our political staff -- what may be uncomfortable questions about issues or beliefs attached, for whatever reason, to all of you -- perception issues, for lack of a better word.

And then Williams went down the list. He asked Edwards about his penchant for fancy haircuts; he asked Kucinich why no one takes him seriously even though his views on the war are popular; he asked Biden about his habit of putting his foot in his mouth; he asked Dodd about the perception that he is too close to special interests; he asked Hillary about her high negatives, and so on.

Now, if you're making a reality show about ten people stranded on Campaign Island who are each trying to win a series of contests to determine who becomes president, then obviously this shit has to be in there. Can Barack learn to get along with Hillary? Can chilly Hillary make the others like her? Will Johnny learn to stop worrying about this hair and get with the program (our judges will secretly give him ten points if he can pass a mirror without looking in it!)? Can Joe learn to shut the fuck up? Tune in next week as our ten Survivors tackle the ten deadly Elephants in the Room!

But obviously none of this stuff has anything to do with anything meaningful. It's just theater, and cheap formulaic theater at that. But things are set up now so that the campaign basically becomes about how the candidates respond to these artificial challenges -- not what the candidate stands for. Canny observers of the first debate will have noted that Bill Richardson got the best reviews, mainly because he did the best job of throwing off his personal media albatross -- namely, his reputation for being a little too much of a jokester. Here's how the Washington Post put it:

We've noted previously... that Richardson's occasional tendency to appear more like a stand-up comic than a candidate for president complicates his chances of being taken seriously in the primary process. And, to his credit last night, Richardson was serious...

The Daily Show parodied this phenomenon by pegging Obama's problem as being the littleness of his ears -- and suggesting that he can improve his electability by the later stages in the race by having them enlarged. They then showed a computer-enhanced photo of what the "improved" Obama might potentially look like -- a grinning goon with huge ears. Of course, the problem with the Daily Show lately is that it's not quite far enough from reality to really be comedy. Not when John Edwards responds to charges of being too much of a rich pretty boy by dragging his Dad out in the middle of the debate -- literally pointing him out in the audience -- and telling a story about how said poor loser Dad used to be too broke to buy his kids breakfast after church.

3) The Democrats keep failing the Dukakis test.