Pre-Debate Analysis

I love calling the crap I write analysis. It makes me feel big and important. I'm going to rename my blog and tell people I work as an analyst:

PERSON: "What do you do?"
ME: "I'm an analyst."
PERSON: "Oh! What think thank do you work for?"
ME: "Um...the Center for Strategery and Important International Relationships Foundation Board Center (dot com)."
PERSON: "How did you do that?"
ME: "Do what?"
PERSON: "Speak in parentheses."
ME: "It's one of our strategeries."

So, the big debate is tonight. Grab a beer, a bowl of popcorn, and pray that no one from a Bush rally sneaks in and poses as an undecided voter.

"UNDECIDED" VOTER: "President Bush. A President needs to face the public regularly and give frank answer to tough questions. In that spirit, I ask you this: Why does God love you so much? Also, do you think the terrorists will win and God will smite us if Kerry is elected, or do you just think the terrorist will win?"

Actually, there will be no self-identified undecided voters in the audience. It is made up of "soft supporters," people selected by the Gallup who are leaning towards a candidate but say they may switch sides. Which is good, because the percentage of people that identified themselves as undecided in the last Gallup poll is 0, and an audience of undecided voters would have to be made up of trolls, pixies, elves, and talking unicorns.

UNICORN: "Mr. President, I--"
PRESIDENT BUSH: "I know you! You're the unicorn that gives me advice in my dreams."
UNICORN: "Uh, yeah…"
KARL ROVE: [hissing from back stage] Sir! That's me with a strap-on dildo on my head. You fell asleep at the briefing last week. There was no other way.

To go on a tangent for a bit, ………..visit Pancake City tonight for the most important Presidential debate poll on the web!

(My traffic doubled the night after the first debate from people looking to vote in online polls.)

Although I'm not going to actually have a poll……………I do hope people visit to vote on the performances of President Bush and Kerry, both of whom said many key words in their responses, responses that were broadcasted by major news organizations, which followed the debate with important online polls.

Back to my expert analysis of tonight's debate. (This is a good moment to thank my boss Ralph, the executive director at CSIIR-FBC, for giving me the time to share my analysis with you.)

Obviously, both sides try to manage expectations so they can influence the post-debate coverage. But President Bush is at the end of one of the worst weeks in his Presidency.

And he has never been in a situation where the pressure was on him to perform well. The expectation he set for himself (and got the media to accept) in the 2000 debates was, "Golly gee, I hope I don't get crushed by this slick Washington insider, whose nickname, I've heard, is Double-Down Demosthenes."

So there's this conflict between low and high expectations. In one way, the expectations for Bush have never been lower. He's going to do better because he can't do any worse. It's almost impossible.

What's he going to do, demand to answer a question and then pause for 15 seconds instead of five? Repeat phrases 18 times instead of 17? Bush repeated "hard work" so often in the last debate he sounded like he had Tourette's.

So the post-debate analysis "the President did better this time" is a given. But because reality finally gathered a few of his friends and bum rushed the bouncer, he has a lot of political damage to cover. The expectations for him are also high because of necessity. His campaign expects him to do well because they need him to do well. But because many of Kerry's rhetorical blows are based on what the Bush administration calls the R word, it puts him in the difficult position of mounting a defense that requires denying even a base acknowledgement of facts.

In other words, reality bites, and if the audience asks decent questions and Kerry attacks well again, it will be probably be too much for Bush to overcome.