Debate question: Who wants to be President?

Suppose Presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer were in the front of a fifth grade classroom and had asked, “Okay, students, who wants to be President of the United States for the next four years?”

The Romney kid in the front row is instantly on his feet jumping up and down, waving his arms in the air yelling “I do, I do!”

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen the Energizer Bunny on TV, but last night he was back in the form of Mitt Romney.

Meanwhile there’s Barack Obama, sitting next to the flailing Energizer kid. The president gives one of his knowing, ingratiating smiles. You get the vague sense that he’s not so sure the presidency is his first order of business.

In any case, he's not on his feet. He doesn't do flailing.

Instead there’s all this “sweetie” talk about his 20th wedding anniversary. Besides, he’s already president. He knows it’s not something to jump up and down about.

This mixing of classroom fantasy with reality is not so far-fetched because we had a good deal of fantasy in Wednesday’s presidential debate. Most of it was provided by Romney. 

But who knew? (Somebody in the Obama campaign certainly should have.)

Here’s another analogy. Mitt brought his Mr. Moderation A game to the debate. The man plays all kinds of games. As we know, he uses a quite different one when "playing" behind closed doors to wealthy donors. And there's another for the primary race in, say, South Carolina.

Last night, not surprisingly, he was out to woo middling, undecided independents.

Meanwhile the president was decidedly in his “no drama”-Obama, B-game mode.

Coasting.

It didn't cut it.

Back to Romney. How about that curious self-assured timbre to his voice? We haven’t heard that kind of cocky self-confidence since, well, Ronald Reagan. Did you catch it? Romney's treatment of Obama was oddly reminiscent of the Gipper’s “there you go again” scolding of Jimmy Carter.

Could Romney have been coached to “do a Reagan”? If so (and it seems likely), it was a smart move.

But there was more. Obama was in trouble out of the gate when, as the first to speak, he launched into his now familiar overview of the past four years. One’s eyes glaze over....

The well-prepped Romney responded with personal anecdotes about two people he and his wife had encountered while working the hustings.

Here’s Romney:

I was in Dayton, Ohio, and a woman grabbed my arm, and she said, I’ve been out of work since May. Can you help me? Ann yesterday was a rally in Denver, and a woman came up to her with a baby in her arms and said, Ann, my husband has had four jobs in three years, part-time jobs. He’s lost his most recent job, and we’ve now just lost our home. Can you help us?

Okay, undecided voter, what do you remember today? The Obama recitation or the two women and their plight? Oh, and the aggrieved women just so happened to be in Ohio and Colorado, two critical states in this election.

And could you, independent voter, have been thinking: This is Washington insider versus the man (and wife) of the people.

Earth to the president! Hello? Time to wake up.

Feeling it

I’m finally learning how this blog site “visits” thing works. And it is confirming, in strange ways, a lot of my suspicions about this presidential campaign.

All the “visitors” in the past week aren’t reading about Mount St. Helens or my motor scooter diaries. No need to “warn” them that I’m going off their topic of choice: Sarah Palin’s glasses.

Alas, they never even see the posts about what E10 does to two-stroke engines or how I walked away from Mount St. Helens a wiser man.

And they will never see these words either.

No, they are coming directly to the “spec-tacular” Sarah post.

Yesterday when I googled “Sarah Palin” and “glasses,” the Red Electric came up something like eighth on the list. No wonder I had 800 visits on Saturday, up from the normal 40 to 50. It’s still running around 150.

As the glasses freaks mellow out and go back to doing whatever they do, the visits will drop.

The rush to read about Sarah’s glasses is a reminder that it’s not what Sarah (or any politician) says that will get her or him elected. It’s not what she tells Charles Gibson; it’s how she looks — how she “feels.”

Yes, television is a tactile as well as a visual medium.

Tactile is a concept, first applied to our “Teflon president” Ronald Reagan. Nothing stuck to him because he was just such a “feel good” guy with a sunny personality,

And nothing is sticking now to Sarah with her intriguing marmish glasses and her “frontier fundamentalism.”

Not Bristol’s baby
Not Troopergate
Not Bridge-to-Nowhere flip-flops
Not hubby’s secessionist streak
Not state per diems on her own house
Not bravely shooting fish (wolves) in a barrel (on the tundra) from an airplane.

Why isn’t it sticking? We don’t live in a rational, thinking times. We see, relate and feel. That’s why the Christian Right us so excited about Sarah. Religion and reason don’t mix. It’s all about “feeling it.”

How Sarah looks and acts trumps what she has (and hasn’t) done, and certainly what she merely says.

Memo to Barack Obama: Look and act presidential and pissed as hell! Let’s feel it!

Don’t quietly lay out your education policy in front of a bunch of kids, teachers and administrators assembled in a school library, as you did the other day. (Shhhhh!! This is a library.)

Take it to the streets, Barack. Put it to throngs. Large ones.

Whip them up. The streets are where drop-outs end up. Tell 'em that if they “get back in school,” the Obama administration will make the schools worth getting back into.

Go after the plutocrats, the politician with nine houses, the “bubble” politician who thinks you aren’t rich until you make $5 million a year, the oil barons and the Gucci Gulch lobbyists.

Do it, do it fast and do it with feeling!