By Douglas Yates, Ph.D.
Professor at the American Graduate School in Paris, Member of AGS's Academic Committee
After the first US presidential debate which, according to most observers – including even Obama-supporters – had been won by Mitt Romney, there arose an impression that the president might get trounced again by his Republican opponent. But the second presidential debate went better – for Barack Obama – than the first. A small margin of respondents to the instant CNN opinion poll suggested that viewers found the incumbent Democratic president more convincing than his Republican challenger. The Obama camp may be pleased, but do presidential debates really matter?
In a media environment where Americans are saturated by images of the two contenders, it is hard to believe that either presidential debate really introduced the Nobel-prize-winning incumbent president to anyone. It is equally hard to believe that anyone had not heard about Mitt Romney, at least anyone who has also managed to register to vote. What is really at question here is whether debates offer voters a substantive policy choice upon which they can base their vote at the ballot boxes. Democrats tend to vote for the Democratic candidate, and Republicans tend to vote for the Republican, and Democratic-majority states tend to give all their electoral votes to the Democratic candidate, and Republican-majority states tend to give their electors to the Republican. In the end, only the ‘undecided’ voters are considered to be at stake in this campaign, and it is doubtful that they will become suddenly ‘decided’ because of the substance of these debate.
Perhaps only an old college professor like myself even notices that American presidential debates are not really ‘debates,’ in the formal sense of two adversaries dialectically addressing a single point at issue. Rather they are television spectacles, where two men deliver short, improvised speeches, moderated by television journalist-hosts, and sometimes even inviting the audience to ask questions (like an afternoon talk show). In these non-debates, there are exchanges of invective, ad hominem insults, unwarranted claims, unverified facts, slogan-mongering, immaterial subject matter, anecdotal evidence, hypothetical examples, and many other logical fallacies that would be corrected in a properly regulated debate. Rarely are the two adversaries forced to follow a single line of reason to its logical conclusion. This kind of mud-slinging is hardly the right format for valid, conclusive arguments.
If substance is not the most important part of an American presidential debate, no one doubts that candidate ‘style’ matters. In fact, most viewers asked for their opinion on who they believe had won the debate raised issues of style. In the first debate Obama was criticized as sounding too ‘professorial.’ Romney was congratulated on his ‘aggressive’ attacks on the president. Now it is surely a sign of the steep decline of American politics that the adjective ‘professorial’ has become a pejorative, but it is nevertheless reasonable to expect a successful public speaker to adapt his rhetoric to the level of his audience; and Obama’s handlers have expended considerable time and effort to train him to adopt a common touch. But a more lamentable sign of the times is that aggressiveness is the mode favored by the audience, rather than dispassionate reason, for a debate should really be a forum that favors the latter over the former. Angry voters make poor judges.
Television pundits asked whether or not presidential debates matter unanimously agreed that few American elections since the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest have been decided by presidential debates. Yet all of those same pundits seemed to agree, as Steven Colbert joked, that “the debate about whether debates are important” does matter.
Leaving aside the ‘bread and circus’ degeneracy of television politics, that is, ‘the show,’ what information can we look at that does matter?
Most observers agree that this election is about the economy. One thing is certain. Incumbents have done poorly in elections during the world financial crisis. Here in France, for instance, the incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated after serving only one term in office. The longest serving prime minister in modern British history, Tony Blair, also lost his office. The governments of Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Italy have also fallen like dominos with the worsening economic climate. But does this necessarily mean that President Obama will lose his bid for re-election because the economy is doing poorly?
When trying to make a prediction about who will win the 2012 presidential elections it is probably better to look at more reliable economic indicators.
One economic indicator, for example, that has been constantly raised during the recent presidential debates is ‘unemployment.’ No American president has been elected with unemployment rates higher than 7.4 percent. But it is also true that a sudden drop in unemployment rates tend to boost incumbent scores. Aside from the problems of interpreting the measurement of unemployment (like whether the government figures of those registered on the official lists should be used) there are also problems of how to interpret the correlation between unemployment and voting. Unemployment is not a perfect predictor, and it can produce contradictory results depending on whether one looks at the percentage of workers in the unemployed, or the direction and rate of change in that statistic. Also what the public thinks these numbers mean is probably more important than what they actually are.
A different indicator that captures this semiotic ‘meaning’ of economic statistics is the consumer confidence index. For economists the CCI is scrutinized because consumption drives the American economy. For political scientists it is important because since its inception in the late 1960s, the CCI has provided a perfect predictor of presidential elections. The average CCI when incumbent presidents win is 95. When they lose, the average is 75. According to the Conference Board who have researched and published this all-powerful indicator, the CCI has risen recently, from 61.3 in August to 70.3 in September. If this number continues to rise, ceteris paribus, Obama may win re-election.
Now, considering that consumer perceptions about the economy are such a good indicator of voting behavior, wouldn’t it be ideal if those mass perceptions were grounded in reality? Wouldn’t it be important for consumers to have an accurate perception? Moreover, would it not be an important function of television debates watched by larger audiences than almost any national political event to concentrate upon these issues? Notwithstanding the shoddy quality of discourse, the low level of information, and disagreement about the facts, and the ideological filters through which all of that is processed by the partisan audiences, it must still be considered an important function of presidential debates for each side to outline its actual policy platform. Unfortunately, in a format where style counts more than substance, it may be the case that the presidential debates mattered less than they should have.
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