By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 23rd, 2012 
I felt like I was watching the Seinfeld Show. The debate reminded me of the famous episode, in which Jerry and George decide to pitch a situation comedy show to NBC, a show about nothing, about the interactive foibles of daily life, i.e. in the episode George and Jerry share with the audience the premise of the humor of the show they were watching (then America’s most popular). “Debate about nothing” seemed to be the Romney performance strategy last night. Again, as in the first two debates, the Governor moved to the center, but this time he pretended to oppose Obama as he adopted all of Obama’s policies, for better and for worse: on Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and drones. Romney pretended to bury Obama, as he in fact, praised his policies.
Romney expressed his opposition in his body language, in his characterization of Obama’s policies, in name calling, “apology tour” and all, as he supported substantively just about all the policies. Obama’s foreign policies can be and should be criticized by doves and hawks alike, by those who support torture as enhanced interrogation, including Romney until yesterday, and those, including me, who worry about the self-defeating sacrifice of human rights in the name of security, but Romney would have none of this. There is a pressing need for a serious foreign policy debate but Romney had a pitch planned and he professionally delivered it: a potential commander-in-chief, who is not too scary. I am impressed by his acting abilities, which did give reasons for some of his supporters and spinners to be pleased last night and leads me to despair about American democracy.
I can’t emphasize enough how strange Romney was, much stranger than George and Jerry. Of the three debates, last night’s was the most peculiar. As with the other two, it was viewed by the audience and by the performers mostly as . . .
Read more: A Debate About Nothing: Barack Obama v. Mitt Romney (with the Assistance of Jerry Seinfeld)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 22nd, 2012 
Immediately after watching the second Obama – Romney debate, I, along with the majority of the viewers and commentators, concluded that Obama won. But as I collected my thoughts and wrote my initial response, I found that I had actually written a piece that was less about why Obama won, more about why Romney lost. I knew I had to write a follow up.
In the meanwhile, Roy Ben-Shai sent in a very different interpretation, which I thought was important to share. He thought that as the President won the battle of the moment, Barack Obama, the principled political leader who can make a difference, lost. While Romney didn’t win, the empty game of “politics as usual” did. I am not sure that I agree with his judgment, but I do see his point.
The quality of Obama’s rhetoric and argument is one of the four main reasons why I think that Obama has the potential to be a transformational president, which I analyzed fully in Reinventing Political Culture. Obama has actually battled against sound bite and cable news culture, and prevailed. But not last Thursday: Ben-Shai is right. Obama beat Romney not by playing the game of a strikingly different political leader, capable of making serious arguments in eloquent ways, establishing the fact that there is an alternative to the politics of slogans and empty rhetoric, but by beating Romney at his own game, dominating the stage, provoking with quick clipped attacks and defenses. The idealist in me is disappointed, but I must admit only a little.
Tough practical political struggle is necessary and not so evil. Democratic political persuasion can’t replicate the argument in a seminar room or a scientific journal. The rule of the people is not the rule of the professoriate and advanced graduate students, and it’s a good thing, keeping in mind the extreme foolishness of distinguished intellectuals cut off from the daily concerns of most people. Popular common sense helps avoid intellectual betrayals, untied to . . .
Read more: Obama Wins?
By Roy Ben-Shai, October 18th, 2012 
Many are saying that Obama “won,” that is, we won, the second presidential debate. I find this to be untrue, at least in the bigger picture, and unfortunately so.
Let us take a brief look at the recent events that led up to this debate. Prior to the debates, Romney was heavily down in the polls. The generally accepted view was that his only chance to overturn the scores would be some remarkable (almost magical) landslide at the presidential debates. But that, it was stressed, would be highly unlikely. After all, how much difference could a debate make? We already know the positions of the sides by heart; nothing substantively new or sufficiently remarkable could be stated so as to halt, let alone counter, Romney’s overwhelming flight downwards. Or is it? Romney showed up to the first debate like his life depended on it. True enough: the contents of the respective positions are known in advance and could not make much difference. But the performance could. Romney would be aggressive, precise, and most importantly, attack Obama directly (with the minimal courtesy and respect due, of course) at every occasion. He would show the American people who the true leader is, and what a terrible mistake they are making. Obama and his camp seem to have been caught off guard, overly confident, underestimating both Romney’s resilience and the potential importance of the debate.
Romney came to the first debate, so to speak, to the kill, and one of the main reasons for Obama’s “loss” was that he did not respond in kind. Romney was attacking, speaking directly to and about Obama, yet he did not heed to Romney’s rhythm. Obama stuck to his own tempo and demeanor, while on a few occasions being taken aback. This made him look “weak” and “tired,” even confused compared to Romney’s sharpness. This, it seems to me, simply confirms Obama’s most characteristic and compelling traits, and part of his particular nobility as a politician.
Ever since his first campaign, Obama made it a point to speak positively rather than negatively, to minimize the attacks on . . .
Read more: Obama v. Romney: A Critique of the Culture of Debate
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 17th, 2012 
The debate was again very stimulating, and again I had trouble sleeping, more out of excitement this time, not because I was fighting against despair, as was the case after the first Obama – Romney confrontation.
This debate turned the election back to its substantial fundamentals. Obama’s September advantage has evaporated. It was perhaps inflated by the Democrats excellent convention performance and the Republican’s very poor one, and also by Romney’s 47% put down. Now there is a real contest between a centrist who is trying to move the center to the left (think Obamacare), and a professional candidate with unknown political orientation, clearly against Obama, though not clear what he is for.
Three competing approaches to governance, in fact, have been presented in the campaign. If Romney had won last night, he would likely win the election. Then there would be a contest between Romney, the Massachusetts moderate, and Romney, the severe conservative. There’s no telling what the result would be. But because Obama prevailed, he is still in there, and for three reasons I think that he will likely prevail. It’s a matter of authenticity, common sense and American identity.
Moderate Romney won the first debate because he performed well and because the President didn’t. That was reversed last night. The President was sharp, answering questions accurately and with authority, responding to Romney’s attacks precisely, most evident in the way he turned his greatest vulnerability, his administration’s handling of the attacks on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
Romney tried to use the same technics to dominate and shape the discussion as he did the last time. But it was off putting. He insisted on talking when moderator Candy Crowley tried to keep him within the time limit, first with success, then failing. His attempt to bully a woman didn’t look good, as was noted on social media. And then there was the unfortunate turn of phrase “binders full of women,” a phrase that took off on the web immediately, revealing as it does a patronizing approach to woman and a view from on . . .
Read more: Romney Loses!
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 8th, 2012 
I woke up Saturday morning blown away by Charles Blow. His witty defense of PBS in his column is perfect. PBS as the enactment of the ideal of a democratic culture: refined, enlightening, open, inclusive, transforming. Blow presents not only illuminating personal reflections gleaned from the one gaffe of the Presidential debate on Wednesday, the dissing of Big Bird and PBS, as Aron Hsiao’s post yesterday analyzed, Blow also significantly addresses one of the crucial fields of contestation in American history: the perils to and promise of cultural excellence in a democracy. I have been thinking about this issue for much of my career. It was at the center of my book The Cynical Society: The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life. Blow shows how Big Bird and his Sesame Street friends, along with much else in PBS programing, contribute in a significant way to the health of the republic and its citizens.
Blow celebrates the character of Big Bird as it contributed to his own character. “I’m down with Big Bird.” Being black and poor in rural America, in the absence of good schools, PBS became his top quality primary and secondary schools. His uncle daily cared for him and permitted only one hour of PBS TV each day. (The same regime, I used with my kids. I wonder: how many millions were so raised?)
Blows imagination was sparked. His thirst for knowledge was quenched. He learned about science through nature programs, to his mind his SAT prep. He devoured arts programs, which he believes enabled him, a college English major without formal art training, to work as the design director of The New York Times and the art director of National Geographic magazine.
“I don’t really expect Mitt Romney to understand the value of something like PBS to people, like me, who grew up in poor, rural areas and went to small schools. These are places with no museums or preschools or after-school educational programs. There wasn’t money for travel or to pay . . .
Read more: On “Don’t Mess with Big Bird”
By Aron Hsiao, October 7th, 2012 
Mitt Romney’s “Big Bird moment” in the first presidential debate of the 2012 election season is no small thing. Analysts have not yet, in my judgment, understood its full importance. Governor Romney both disrespected a great American symbol, Big Bird, and attacked a broadly respected and supported public institution, PBS. The China connection was especially provocative. Mitt’s argument against Big Bird and PBS, which leveraged popular anti-China sentiments, came off as elitist, cynical and opportunistic.
In 1983, well in advance of the warming of the Cold War, Sesame Street’s Big Bird introduced a generation of Americans to the culture of a rising China. Big Bird did this in a way that was intellectually generous, humanitarian, and even graceful at the same time. Though there are those that might regard Big Bird in China as simple children’s fare, few in America could have done the job that Big Bird did without having egregiously politicized it, even if unintentionally. In contemporary discussions of U.S. – China foreign policy, it is often forgotten that many in the current generation of American consumers, producers, business leaders, and politicians first encountered the then waking dragon of Chinese society through Sesame Street’s Big Bird.
Big Bird belongs to that rarefied sphere of public figures that are beyond criticism, politics, or reproach, as a normative matter, to be embraced and admired. In Big Bird’s case, this is not only because his cognitive development is that of a young child, and our culture constructs childhood to be a time of innate innocence, but also because he is something of a foundational cultural universal. Since the ’70s, several generations of American children have learned important life lessons from Big Bird—lessons about social norms, tolerance and diversity, culture and difference, everyday pragmatics, life events such as birth and death, and the gestalt core of human experience.
The Governor, elaborating on budget cuts that might be necessary at the federal level under his economic plan, offered Big Bird and PBS as examples of federal allocations that might have to end. “I’m sorry, Jim,” said Romney. “I’m going to . . .
Read more: Romney’s Big Bird Moment
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 4th, 2012 
As a strong supporter of Barack Obama, I found the debate last night painful. Romney performed well. Obama didn’t.
I take solace in a dial group session by a respected Geoff Garin, which found that sixty percent of the study group of undecided voters and weakly committed Democrats viewed Obama favorably for his performance, and that eighty percent of this crucial group after the debate saw the President as more likable and down to earth. And on key issues, Obama decisively prevailed on improving the economy and on Medicare, though the group did marginally shift to Romney on taxes. A small study suggested that a key target audience of the debate didn’t go along with the talking heads.
I also am somewhat relieved by Nate Silver, the statistics guru now publishing at The New York Times, who first made his name in sports, then in politics. He judged, using a football analogy, that Romney in his strong debate scored a field goal not a touchdown or the two touchdowns that Silver earlier declared Romney would have to score to win in November. He gained only a slight advantage.
Yet, as I watched the debate and then listened and read a great deal of commentary, not sleeping through most of the night, I worried that an Obama defeat seemed again to be a possibility, if not a probability. Just about all the commentators and instant polls judged that Romney won the debate, though the meaning of the victory was contested: from nothing has changed, to a reset, to the beginning of the end for Obama.
I want to believe, as also has been discussed, that the debate presents an opportunity for Obama (with the support of his powerful campaign staff), known for his impeccable timing and strategic prowess, to counterpunch in ads and speeches and in the coming debates. I certainly would like to believe that Barack Obama, as Muhammad Ali would put it, was playing “rope – a – dope,” and still “floats like a . . .
Read more: Romney Wins! So What?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 3rd, 2012 
As I anxiously await the debate tonight, I am struck by an Facebook exchange on a friend’s Facebook page, which addressed one of the major issues that lies in the shadows, but is nonetheless very much present: poverty and public policy.
Anna Hsiao read Ayla Ryan’s wrenching autobiographical story, “What Being Poor Really Means,” and remarked:
I guess it’s easy to take money away from starving children when they aren’t yours. Right, Mr. Romney?
Eli Gashi, a mutual friend from Kosovo and a former student at The New School wondered:
How can people vote for Romney – I dont get it 
Anna Hsiao responded:
It’s pure ideology… They’re voting for his money, because that’s somehow gonna make them rich, too.
Muma Honeychild, a friend of Anna’s from Poland, whom I don’t know, insisted:
but how, really?
Anna:
Like it requires rational cause-effect thinking! We are masters of voting against our own interest – Bush’s two terms, hello….
While, Aron Hsiao, Anna’s husband and a student of mine, offered a different theory:
People mistake the absence of misfortune and a hindsight of fortuity for moral and ethical superiority. It’s a monotheist and specifically Protestant tendency, to my eye. “You’re suffering? Well, I haven’t suffered. God and the universe have punished you and rewarded me. . . .
Read more: Romney – Ryan on Poverty: A Question and Exchange
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