I got a great offer from a friend to host, so I’m moving to a new site.

I can now be found at:

toojb.com

“If we’re not going to judge Joe by one sound bite in one interview, which is fair to Joe, and we’re not going to take a mistake that he’s made and say that that’s a death-defying blow, let’s don’t do it for her.”

There’s an obvious problem with this logic. When you judge a candidate based on what she or he says, you take every piece of data, in this case, every interview or press conference given as a part of the whole body of public statements made by the candidate. If the candidate has given only four such ‘data pieces,’ then each single unit ought to be evaluated as one fourth of the totality of what we know about that candidate, or at least her or his public statements. On the other hand, if the candidate has, a hundred pieces (which at last check is about the number of interviews Joe Biden has given since being nominated Vice-President) then any one statement has to be evaluated as one per cent of the totality of their statements, if the candidate has given a number of statements in the thousands or tens of thousands (something like Joe Biden’s total over his career in the senate), then…well, you get the idea.

Biden has been in the senate for thirty years, and has made many memorable gaffes (my favorite–and I wish it were archived somewhere–is when he assumed that since was from the Scranton area, he had coal miner ancestry despite its complete lack of truth). None of them has taken him down, at least in part because they’ve never really succeeded in fully defining his public image. This failure is, in turn, at least in part because he has such a vast body of speeches given and questions answered that people–at least those concerned with voting for him–had a good idea of who he was and what he stood for.

The upshot of this post is that Palin has no such body of work to rely upon. As a newcomer to the political scene, she commanded very little name recognition before her nomination a month ago. Lack of name recognition means that people know nothing about her; ergo, a month ago, people knew nothing about Sarah Palin. The public was therefore asked to gather information about and form an opinion on her starting with her nomination. Given that she has given a total of two real interviews, an appearance with Sean Hannity and what was universally described as a paltry press conference, the voting public really has nothing else on which to judge her.

It seems ridiculous not to judge someone on virtually the only candid shot of them we have to go on.

“She has the related problem of being a compulsive liar. This may seem like hyperbole, but I want to stress that I’m not talking about the fact that she lies frequently, but rather about the fact that she lies in situations when it doesn’t benefit her at all and when it is obvious that she will be caught.”

In evidence of this he cites what on first glance seems like the most trivial thing to lie about ever: asking her daughters about her VP nomination. It turns out, Palin decides to change her sports allegiance whenever it suits her.

A few weeks ago, Kissing Suzy Kolber noticed that Palin, who claimed at a rally in Pennsylvania to be a Steelers fan, was in fact a registered member of a Seattle Seahawks fan club.

It doesn’t end there. Last night, as Jonathan Martin noted, she was in a Philadelphia bar with a “newly purchased” Phillies jacket!

I wonder what hockey team she roots for? Let me guess:all of them!

Palin seems to feel the need to pretend that she is/always has been a fan of the hometown team, regardless of where she is. Does she think this helps her identify with the public?

In contrast, Biden has been a Steelers fan for the vast majority of his life and doesn’t hide it. More impressive in terms of the honesty in sports, Obama not only openly admits his Chicago fandom, he’s actually used it to talk smack in Minnesota!

Growing up as a Red Sox fan in Connecticut, I had to learn that differences about sports ended when the game was over, mostly to avoid fighting my Yankee-rooting friends and family members. As such, trying to pretend you like my team curries no favor with me as I’m not going to be distrustful of someone simply in virtue of their rooting for a different team. When we get down to it, are other people all that different on the issue (six beers into a game at the stadium notwithstanding)? Does lying about sports fandom really gain favor?

I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer to that question, but it’s the wrong question anyway. The right one, it seems to me, is “Is there any explanation for Palin’s behavior other than the following? Either A) she actually enjoys lying or B) she at least feels it categorically has no negative moral ramifications. If changing your sports allegiance when you travel isn’t the icing on Palin’s cake of amassing evidence toward her compulsive lying, I don’t know what is.

“The folly of viewing wars in terms of winners and losers should be fairly obvious to anyone this side of 280 BC, when the battles that introduced the term ‘Pyrrhic victory’ took place. ‘Win’ is a very useful term when discussing baseball – it’s clearly defined by a set of universally agreed upon rules, and the question of who wins and who loses has by far more consequences within the context of the rules of the sport than any other individual outcome on the field. In wars, by contrast, groups of people fight for some period of time, then stop, gradually or all at once, but never according to clearly defined rules.”

I couldn’t agree more, and I take the same to be true for debates. By the same logic, it’s not that a participant in a debate is actually convinced by his or her opponent and recants all earlier stated views. Nothing of the sort goes on: one might argue there is no such objective measure of ‘winning’ a debate.

As such, when people instinctively ask the question after a debate “who won?” there can be different definitions of winning upon which they rely. I take the general disagreement between the media and the polls on the ‘winner’ to be a result of the media and the polled voters defining winning differently.

The best way I can think of to describe the two different camps’ theories is by what questions they ask at the end of the debate. I was a debater and subsequently a debate judge throughout high school and college, and even occasionally in grad school. When I judged a debate round, I was asked to choose a winner along the following question “The better debating was done by x,” where x is either a participant or team of participants. This method seems to be the most intuitive way to judge a debate in terms of winners and losers, and I take it to be what the media did. However, the general voting public seems, or at least ought to be, more interested in the question “Which candidate would make a better president?” or “Which candidate do I want to vote for?” Judging debates per se is all well and good, but an activity fundamentally different from attempting to choose an elected official. In fact, I think a little exploration of ways in which people answer the two different questions will show that the participant winning a debate in judges’ terms will almost always lose in voters’ terms.

The following is paraphrased from a speech I was asked to give at several judges’ training seminars for college debate tournaments.

The fundamental tool a judge must have to judge a debate is a list called a ‘flow-chart’ in which the judge writes down different points or areas of argumentation, and then each debater’s response, response to a response, etc. At the end of the round, the judge is asked to look at the flow-chart and determine A) which points were more important to the overall topic of the debate and B) who had the most compelling argument for each point. If a debater or team failed to address a point or respond to a response, they were said to have “dropped” the point and the last thing that their opponent said, as long as it’s not completely ridiculous, stands.

One crucial implication of this method is that for a debater to win, most if not all points must be addressed. For instance, if, say, my opponent in a debate on foreign policy argued that Ba’ath Iraq had a history of supporting terrorism (which it did) and therefore can be linked to Al Qaeda (which it can’t), then said opponent would be making a leap in logic but not an entirely unfounded one. I could easily rebut this argument by pointing out, in my next speech, how absolutely no evidence has been found linking Iraq to 9/11, making them seem less of a threat than several other countries. However, if I failed to mention my rebuttal, then the point my opponent made would stand on the flow-chart kept by the judge, and the judge would have to rule that on the point of Iraq’s threat level, my opponent won (i.e. had the more compelling argument).

Essentially, the judge can’t add in arguments that he or she personally knows to be true as long as they aren’t said by the debater. Moreover, points and attacks left unresponded to are by definition a plus for the attacker.

On this view, it’s easy to see why Obama lost. Like my aforementioned friend Akhbar, I too thought, on first glance, that McCain “won” in a technical sense. This was my intuition simply because Obama let McCain say a lot of easily refutable things that he didn’t bother to refute. He let McCain steer the conversation topic away from real economic policy and to his hackneyed jokes on bears, genetics, and pork (new and improved with no mention of any bridges whatsoever), which made McCain seem to “win” a point on the flow-chart. In fact, even on the topics where there seems to be agreement that Obama won, such as on the economy, it was my impression that he didn’t respond to several snarky comments made by McCain. Potentially most important, he didn’t once directly respond to McCain repeatedly calling him inexperienced and naive.

In fairness, the best debaters on this measure of judgment were usually assholes.

They would either calmly mock their opponent and their opponent’s points to make them seem less real with well-timed and delivered sarcasm or they would scream until their faces became red about how they were right and it was a goddamned moral imperative (rumor has it that such debate tactics were the inspiration for the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”).

In start contrast, presidents need to seem calm and collected, albeit forceful at the same time. Not passive or aggressive, merely assertive. Barack Obama didn’t fail to respond directly to many of McCain’s attacks or his accusation of inexperience because he wasn’t trying to win a debate in front of judges, rather, he was trying to appear presidential during a debate. He wanted to come off like an informed statesman, and he succeeded. He would, it seemed, lower his stature by deigning to respond to the pettiness of McCain. On that measure, it’s easy to see how Obama polled so well after the debate.

So, when you ask who won this last debate, the answer depends on what you mean by winning.

UPDATE: 4:17 PM EDT: I have yet to update the blog for EDT/EST.

Meanwhile, Akhbar commented on my post, pointing out that for the majority of people, the question that matters is who is more likely to win votes, rather than my question about who debated better. I couldn’t agree more: the general public is by definition the vast majority over the people who actually care about who did the better debating, a question I take to be essentially limited to ex-debate dorks and pundits who like to issue win/lose proclamations.