Governor: allow me to warn you off a particular direction that your advisors seem to be taking you, as per the New York Times. According to the newspaper of record:
Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August.
Please don’t do this. I mean, yes, I want to see you crash and burn in the elections, but I also have a fundamental sense of decency.
Do not do this to yourself.
You’re not funny.
Your aides claim that you have a dry wit. No. Jack Benny had a dry wit. You are a modern day Jack Benny in the sense that in modern day, Jack Benny is dead.
I know the temptation is great to aim for the sound bite audience. After all, most Americans are ADD when it comes to serious political topics and have a much easier time wrapping what passes for their brains around jokes, quips, and memorable bon mots. And you probably figure that Obama is a stiff and thus an easy target. I think that’s a serious miscalculation. Obama was able to crack jokes about bin Laden at the same time that he was dispatching Seal Team Six to cap him. Obama is funny in the clutch; you’re funny as a crutch.
In my opinion, the absolute worst thing you can do is go into the debates under the impression that you’re going to be a conservative pundit a la Stephen Colbert. Governor, I’ve met Stephen Colbert. I’ve watched Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert is an acquaintance of mine. You,sir, are no Stephen Colbert.
PAD
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Because digging one hole wasn’t enough.
I agree with you 100%, Peter. During the entire campaign thus far, the only time Romney ever said anything even remotely clever was his line about Bill Clinton this past
week and even then, I’d maybe give him a B. Romney is the political equivalent of Bruce Kirby’s character in Good Morning Vietnam who says, ‘In my heart, I know I’m funny!’ but of course everybody knows he’s not. But more importantly, Romney can’t deliver a funny line either. Obama isn’t the funniest guy either, but as we’ve seen a number of times, notably the white House Correspondents Dinner, he can deliver a joke when he wants to. The one thing we know with absolutele certainty is that both Obama and Romney will come to that first debate armed with a couple of zingers. Obama will wait until the absolute second to deliver his with deadly accuracy. Romney, like George Costanza and his ‘jerk store’ line, will be dying to deliver what he he thinks is a stunning riposte, and in his hurry, he will blow the timing of the joke and look like an idiot.
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Incidentally Pete, the Quayle/Bentsen debate you referenced is an interesting case. Bentsen’s debate advisors had already picked up on Quayle’s habit of comparing himself to JFK, so they came up with the ‘You’re no Kenndy’ line knowing that there was a good chance that Quayle would do it again. In actual fact, Bentsen waited until the third or fourth time Quayle went down that road before he finally delivered that line, with maximum timing and effect.
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And Paul Ryan? You’re not funny either. Anybody who has to read his ‘spontaneous’ Packers/give-me-a-break riff from a cheat sheet is not funny.
Joe: I knew that, actually. If you watch the video, when Quayle says it, Bentsen’s expression is that of a lion in the high grass when he sees that a cripple gazelle has just wandered into sight.
PAD
Humor has a liberal bias.
Very true. He keeps insisting how funny he is, and everyone whose opinion he seems to value agrees with him, but he seems to have zero delivery. Even when it comes to humor, he appears completely tone-deaf.
Here’s another interesting one, although it’s really more of a non-sequitur. If anybody ever gets a chance to see the beginning of the Joe Biden/Sarah Palin debate again, when they shake hands, Palin asks Biden if she can call him Joe. The reason was that for some inexplicable reason, during debate prep, she kept referring to him as O’Biden. Nobody could figure out why, but they couldn’t cure her of this weird verbal tic either, so they decided in the end that Palin would ask to refer to him as Joe. And not that you would ever want to watch that entire debate again, but at one point, she still refers to him as O’Biden, although I’m not sure most people even noticed.
I always went with the theory SNL put forward.
“Can I call you Joe? Good, because I’ve got some zingers where I call you ‘Joe.'”
A lot of people make the “O’biden” portmanteau slip. Clinton did it once during his DNC speech a couple weeks ago. It’d be a whole other thing if it was happening multiple times in one event, of course.
I think Romney’s big problem in the debates (apart from a long history of flip-flops) is his near-total lack of spontaniety. While this certainly hurts when delivering a joke, it will also hurt if he gets flustered or surprised (and Obama is a master speaker) and starts reverting to talking points or, worse, his ultra-rich side (“ten thousand dollar bet?”) that plays into the Democrats’ narrative that he’s completely out of touch with the “common” American.
Oh, no, no, no … I’m looking forward to this “strategy” with unholy glee.
And, to be candid, it’s got very little to do with my own political leanings and preferences.
First, like Carlin, I am a fan of entropy. I love watching the falcon unable to hear the falconer as things fall apart. And holy bugnuts, how sweet a trainwreck this campaign has been on the GOP side. First, you had the seemingly-unending cycle of “X is now the frontrunner because he/she is the craziest new face on the scene” during the primaries, only to have them all outlasted by a combination of Brad Majors and Thurston Howell III.
Then you have the missteps. The hidden videos. The Akin flap. The absolute wrong reaction to the Libya attack. The flailing around as Safire and Will pile on against their own side and Joe Scarborough covers his pained face.
But also, there’s a visceral need for Romney to crash and burn: After all, he’s what every smarmy rich-kid villain from Eighties teen movies would grow up to be (not the jáçkášš rich jock; that grows up to be Dubya). How could you NOT want to see him pushed off a cliff by a guy who has every strike against him: Furriner-soundin’ name, inheritor of the second-worst economic downturn in living memory, stuck with a do-nothing deadlocked Congress … and to cap it all off, he has the Blazing Saddles curse: “The Sheriff’s a–!”
I half expect to see a montage flash every night on the news of Obama feverishly prepping for the election, backed by a three-power-chord arena-rock anthem, you know?
Crashing and burning in the debates may be the game plan. At this point, I’m half convinced that Romney is fûçkìņg up so badly so that we can’t help but start to feel sorry for him and give him sympathy votes.
If this weren’t a virtual carbon copy of 2008 when the GOP saddled McCain with Palin to make sure he’d lose and the Dems would look bad for not fixing an economy in 4 years that is going to take at least a generation to fix, I’d say the Reps were looking to get a lock on the next election.
Unfortunately their strategy kinda backfired when the teabaggers hit a tidal wave in 2010 and gave Obama a actual wall to bash his head against in Congress, thereby giving Obama the opportunity to say “See, I tried to fix things but the Republican Congress is blocking everything I do to try and fix things.”
Lest anyone accuse me of having Obama’s tender bits in my mouth and being a blind Dem, I think Obama has screwed up a lot of his opportunities and backed out of a lot of his promises (GitMo, Patriot Act, etc.).
But in the end, it comes down to the repub claims of financial irresponsibility /danger, or voting for the repubs and setting all Americans’ rights back a few centuries and helping the rich get richer.
Since it’s easier to fix financial issues than to get rights back once the government takes them away, Obama is the lesser of the two evils in this election.
I don’t know … such a move would be depriving both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of some serious comedy gold that’s sure to follow such a debacle … I mean debate …
I mean watching Romney pontificating, strutting around, and harrumping on stage is bound to be like watching amateur night at a comedy club … lots and lots of really bad lies … uh, lines …
Too bad that everything’s so tightly regulated in the debates that the moderator isn’t allowed to actually pose “on the spot” questions thereby creating real tension for the debaters as they would face questions that haven’t been vetted every which way.
The only time, I think, to really get a sense of things is in the beginning before the debates start, between sound bites, and at the end.
With all the talk of Romney screwing up, let’s not forget that Obama is equally capable of blowing it. He is a good speaker, not necessarily good at debate. His twofold challenge, and it’s not an easy one, is to appear unflappable and presidential while also getting under Romney’s skin. If he does the latter, he will almost certainly precipitate a ‘Do you want to bet?’ moment. And since the camera picks up and shows EVERYTHING, if Obama stays cool while Romney gets trembly and sweaty, that is absolutely what will be reported the next morning. Just ask Richard Nixon.
Here’s an article about the right wing’s ‘culture problem’: http://www.salon.com/2012/09/30/the_rights_pop_culture_problem/
When I read this quote from the Romney team, my first thought was of a ship sinking in the ocean.
Captain: Okay, I have a plan to save the boat, but it depends on Mitt Romney’s sense of humor.
Everyone else on board: Abandon ship!
At this point I almost don’t care about the debate as advertised. I’ll still watch, but I’ll be wishing we were getting a 90 minute, free form Romney/Biden debate instead. The comedy gold flowing from their lips would put to shame anything that SNL could come up with.
In fairness, though, the average 4 year old could put to shame anything SNL has come up with in the past 20 years or so.
–Daryl
The hëll you say. The average episodes are hit and miss to be sure, but their 2008 election stuff was pure gold. Hëll, most of their Presidential election period skits have killed it for decades now.
Granted, the Kerry/Bush election cycle didn’t produce as much gold, but how in the hëll do you top reality with a pair of candidates like those two?
I just haven’t found anything entertaining on SNL in many years. For starters, they don’t seem to know how to actually end sketches anymore…they just sort of…stop. Then there’s the sense that they’re less concerned with writing just for the funny, but an inordinate focus on trying to come up with recurring bits and characters.
That’s just my take. One of these days, the show might be watchable again, but I’m not holding my breath.
–Daryl
Are you going to live blog the debate? I cant wait to see how Romney will do. C-Span has a lot of previous Presidential debates and it is fun…or at least fun for me, to compare them. What I cant wait for is the Biden/Ryan debate. I wonder if he will wear a suit that fits?
I have a bowling league that evening, but Kath has volunteered to do it here in my place.
PAD
I wish you the best of luck bowling! I look forward to seeing what is posted.
I’m not sure but I think there’s a politically apt metaphor in that. (Or should that be a metaphorically apt political statement?)
Interesting article, Neil.
At first, I was skeptical. I mean, does the Right has a “culture problem”? Lots of pop culture is oriented towards conservative values somewhat: from James Bond to Batman to almost every horror movie ever made.
But then I understood that the guy meant the current batch of American conservatives, Tea Party Evangelicals that probably think Bond and Batman are sex deviants.
Got me to wonder, what does a Teavangelical likes? Besides Ayn Rand and Left Behind, I mean. Country music? 1950s sitcoms?
And someone really should write a mash-up of Ayn Rand and Left Behind. Maybe the Job Creators all go to heaven in a flash, while the rest of us Commie Creeps must suffer the Tribulation as we realize that investors and entrepreuners were all that held society together.
I am suddenly reminded of an episode of the West Wing. Leo deliberately blew some of the debate prep so that everybody would have really low expectations, (“Spinning molten core of the Earth low”), and, when he didn’t didn’t do half bad at the real thing, everyone would be more impressed because of it.
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Though I seriously doubt anyone would try that trick in this debate.
I wouldn’t put it past Romney to try something similar, it’s just make his failure even more spectacular…