Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
The media loved his attacks on Hillary Clinton. But most voters aren't biting.
Sep 22, 2000 | The results from last week's debate between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio are now in, and they point to one overwhelming conclusion: The experts completely missed the boat. I watched the debate with my 9-year-old son, Alex, who at one point turned to me and asked -- a little gleefully -- "Do they ever actually fight?"
The possibility had crossed his mind, not during the climactic moment when Lazio crossed the stage to demand that Clinton sign a pledge to abstain from the use of soft money, but during one of his lesser encroachments on her airspace. Lazio's behavior felt not only unremittingly hostile but artifically so: He seemed like a fundamentally soft figure who had been instructed to act tough, and had inadvertently spun the dial all the way to rabid. Clinton, on the other hand, struck me as measured, deliberate, professional. I scored her as winning almost every round. (I gave the nod to Lazio when Clinton said that communities should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they want casino gambling, and Lazio said flatly that gambling was the wrong way to go about economic development.)
And then I listened to the post-fight commentary, and felt, as Clinto said of Lazio, that I had been "orbiting another planet." Immediately after the debate, on MSNBC's "Hardball," Peggy Noonan, a notorious Hillary-hater, described the first lady's manner as "robotic." Even Clinton chronicler Gail Sheehy, presumably slotted as pro-Clinton, scored the fight as a draw. All agreed that Lazio had shown his mettle. In the next day's paper, experts impaneled by the New York Daily News gave Lazio the nod 57-50; the editorial page concluded that Lazio "had exuded a more New York sense." The New York Times editorial page, no friend to either candidate, called Lazio the "smoother, more aggressive performer." David Broder declared that Lazio had proved himself a force to be reckoned with. What had looked to me like comic swagger and cartoonish bluster had registered as confidence and backbone with Broder. Times columnist Gail Collins did describe Lazio's performance as "crazed," but voices like hers were markedly in the minority.
And then the vox populi was weighed and measured. Instant polls were mixed -- one for Clinton, two for Lazio. But opinion was remarkably unanimous among undecided voters. All six of the fence-sitters whom the Times had been following in recent months felt that Clinton had carried the day. In USA Today, the figure was eight for eight. Of the 10 undecided voters polled by the Buffalo News, most had moved into the Clinton column. And a Times/CBS poll conducted between one and six days after the debate provided the decisive evidence: Not only was Clinton voted the winner 47-34, but a majority of voters believed that Lazio had been too aggressive, while scarcely any felt that way about Clinton. In fact, the debate helped Clinton widen her lead in the poll from five to nine points.
The same language kept recurring in interviews: One respondent told the Times, "He came off as a much more immature person, and she came off very collected."
The extremely wide range of judgments should remind us that the means of expression available to us -- gesture, tone, word choice, facial expression -- are so open-ended and indeterminate that three people scrutinizing the same set of behaviors can offer three different interpretations. But in this case the range has a pattern. What can explain the gap between expert and ordinary opinion? One hypothesis is that the public didn't get it, and the experts did; that is, that Clinton really was robotic, and Lazio really did exude a more New York sense. But this would be odd, since the experts are essentially trying to anticipate public opinion rather than form a personal impression. A likelier explanation is that the undecided voters were reacting to their own intuitive judgments, while the experts were reacting to their own expectations. The experts, in effect, weren't receiving their own intuitive judgments.
Get Salon in your mailbox!