October 5, 2004
A Month's a Lifetime... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
I will always remember hearing this old saw from Newsweek journalist and NBC analyst Howard Fineman: "In politics, a day's a week, a week's a month and a month's a lifetime." At this writing, we've got a month to go before the presidential election of 2004, which means this race has a lifetime ahead of it. So why am I so darn irritated by the tsunami of analysis surrounding "Who won the first presidential debate?"
The only breath of fresh air I saw were early on, when a half-dozen undecided voters from a town in Ohio, were questioned immediately after the telecast. They each said that Kerry had scored points, but they were holding off making their decision until hearing the rest of the debates. Nothing I've seen or heard since then erodes the basic authenticity of what they said.
In retrospect, I feel like shouting: "Yes! This is how adults make decisions! And isn't it great that the voters are all adults!"
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In the two days following this first debate, I happened to fly back and forth across the country, and besides watching television, I read the newspapers in a number of cities and towns. Astonishing to me was the panoply of different pseudo-analytical approaches to determining who won the debate and what it meant. From major media sources to one medium-sized city in Texas which came up with no less than five different methods, they all awarded the blue ribbon to Kerry. This is then followed by a secondary analysis about what this first conclusion means.
Pardon me, but we would never permit such approaches in science.
You see, in science, there is that little bug-a-boo about linking effect back to cause, and in this case, it's fairly clear that all these predictions about who won the debate and what effect it will have, is a whole lot of rooting around, trying to find something that will predict the final outcome, and if they get lucky, let the political and media establishment to observe the turning of the screw — in real time.
But just like science — it's a whole lot more complicated than that.
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It's not hard to argue that the technology of media encourages faulty thinking. And for sure, the next month will be a lifetime: mistakes will be made, partial facts will be offered and spun, errors in judgment will come back to haunt, lucky breaks will abound, and we cannot forget the technology issues of election day itself. (No matter what your politics, who can forget Florida?)
But technology may provide the positive trump card after all. The will of the voters is just that. Their collective will. And who among us can be sure of what any five people will do, much less millions.
Go. Listen to the candidates themselves through this technology we call television and video, and which we can re-play at will. Go out to debates.org, and read the transcripts of what these men had to say. Close your eyes and listen to the audio of their voices, which, believe me, comes across differently again.
These debates — as heavily negotiated as they are — still enable our individual technology to bring us these fellas one-on-one. And in some arguable way, unscripted. Use the Internet to do whatever other answers you feel you need. Then go. Vote. You're an American. That means you do what you have a mind to. And that's what I like about America and Americans.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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