Debate a 'People's Choice' pledge

Here’s something that should be a topic during the final two presidential debates but won’t.

Call it “The pledge to abide by the will of the people.”

It doesn’t matter which candidate makes the proposal. I’ll leave it to you to decide who might be most likely to make it and what the effect might be on his strategy.

Imagine Mitt Romney or Barack Obama saying the following: “I challenge my opponent to join me in serving the best interests of this nation and the will of the people by agreeing that the only candidate to assume the office of the presidency should be the one winning the plurality of votes cast nationally.

“In short, the winner would not be chosen by the electoral college, but by the American people.”

“We each recognize that individually we could ‘lose’ under this pledge, but we also know the people would win.”

“So I am willing to pledge that unless I win the plurality of the votes, I will not accept the presidency. Accordingly, I will direct ‘my’ Electoral College electors to vote for you.”

“Will you do likewise?”

I’m certain this would produce a collective gasp and send media analysts scurrying to their computers and calculators.

The best authority on the impact of such a proposal is master poll aggregator and data cruncher, Nate Silver of the web site five thirty eight. If you go to the site, you will see his projections for the likelihood of the electoral college being at odds with the popular vote.

Here’s where we are at this point in the campaign, according to Silver’s “now-cast”:

Electoral College tie (269 electoral votes for each candidate) 1.8%
Recount (one or more decisive states within 0.5 percentage points) 14.1%
Obama wins popular vote but loses electoral college 4.9%
Romney wins popular vote but loses electoral college 4.6%

The last two percentages are directly relevant although the other two are a concern. Just think: "hanging chad."

If Silver is correct, there  is a 9.5 percent chance (or one chance in 10.5) that the majority of the electoral college will be bound to vote for the candidate with fewer votes than his opponent.

Silver’s forecast for election day is that there is a 7 percent chance of a the electoral college voting into office the loser of the national vote.

That, of course, is what happened in the 2000 election. Under this proposal, George W. Bush would have forfeited the presidency to Al Gore.

If, by some remote chance, Romney or Obama does propose the “people’s choice” pledge and the other accepts, the campaigns suddenly would be forced to engage every single registered voter in the country, not just those in so-called swing states.

Would it be more expensive? Yes, but campaign financing and cost is already an issue.

Would it be the right thing to do? Absolutely!

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.

Gender lines diverge during debate

If you were tuned in to the CNN broadcast of Wednesday’s debate, you may have been mesmerized by two horizontal lines threading along the bottom of the screen. They wove up and down and crisscrossed each other as Barack Obama and John McCain parried about taxes, abortion and some plumber named “Joe.”

The lines charted the live results of “dial polling” of a small sample of undecided voters in Ohio, an important swing state. The group was registering its real time reactions to the two candidates.

One graph line was for men; the other for women — just like rest rooms and deodorants.

Why CNN decided to divide the results by gender is beyond me. Why not by income? How were the rich reacting compared to the poor or the middle class (whoever they are)? How about blacks and whites? How about gays and straights? How about first born and others? Blue eyes versus brown eyes?

Never mind. In its unfathomable wisdom, CNN had the poll track the reactions of men versus women.

The display called for visual multi-tasking. I’m told the young are much better at this sort of thing than the rest of us. They think nothing of listening to and watching the candidates while they monitor dial polling threads racing across the bottom of the screen. If that wasn’t enough, the changing scores of six debate judges framed the whole thing.

Those of us who surrendered to the multimedia show noticed the curious interplay between the debate and the instant assessment of the Ohio dialers.

The most striking was that regardless of what was being said, women favored Obama and men favored McCain. I thought immediately of one of my favorite media literacy principles: “No two people experience a media message in the same way.”

The lines told me that gender is a significant contributor to perception when it comes to Obama and McCain.

The dialers didn’t seem to be reacting to what each candidate was saying, although certain words like “education” and “children” registered spikes on the moving graph lines. Political consultants (vis Frank Lutz) have made fortunes studying such charged words and how to manipulate them.

No, visual messages dominated perceptions. Whenever a candidate looked directly into the camera and not at the moderator, the lines rose. Viewers like their politicians to look at them directly. Of course, Obama and McCain weren’t looking at the public at all. They were staring into the impersonal camera.

My strong feeling was that the men and women reacted differently to the candidates’ “chemistry,” not their words. Men liked McCain (veteran, aggressive, impulsive, white and “hot” in a McLuhanesque way. Women clearly liked Obama (young, calm, thoughtful, black and “cool”)

The male reaction is easier to explain. McCain displays stereotypical male traits. He gets the testosterone flowing.

As a man, I have more trouble explaining why Obama appeals more to women except to say that McCain doesn’t.

And why is that? Here’s a wild guess: They don’t trust him. Probably at a visceral level.

Even more wild speculation: It has to do with his elevation of a woman so ill equipped to be president. Rather than honoring women with his choice, he has betrayed them.

Sarah Palin was the ghost haunting the Hofstra University gymnasium on Wednesday night. Obama tip-toed around her, saying that he would leave it to the voters to judge her. McCain, against all reason and evidence, draped her with garlands and plastered her with gold stars. It was a very masculine thing to do. It was also a sham that women immediately picked up on — and resented.

The lines on the screen told the tale.