TPM has the photo I have been looking forward to all day. Body language bits: The President looks relaxed and energetic. Head forward, as always, with his Gary Cooper frame. Romney looks stiff and still tired. You can see it in the close-up on TPM. Romney has always had a bit of stiffness, a lack of fluidity, and I have come to associate this with a man that is playing a role, as opposed to someone who is improvising, rolling with the punches. When you have a role to play, things can go wrong, scripts and plans can get off track. You can start to look like a marionette. When you are just improvising, there is no possible wrong thing that can happen, and no plan to keep on track. The subdued red, white, and blue tie was a nice touch. A small lesson: the person who crosses his arm over his body in a photo is generally perceived to be the weak one; they are seen as conscious of their vulnerability, and guarded. That’s a big reason that Romney looks so defeated here. Be sure to be the one to reach across the open space, and not your body.
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TPM has the photo I have been looking forward to all day.

Body language bits:

The President looks relaxed and energetic. Head forward, as always, with his Gary Cooper frame.

Romney looks stiff and still tired. You can see it in the close-up on TPM. Romney has always had a bit of stiffness, a lack of fluidity, and I have come to associate this with a man that is playing a role, as opposed to someone who is improvising, rolling with the punches.

When you have a role to play, things can go wrong, scripts and plans can get off track. You can start to look like a marionette. When you are just improvising, there is no possible wrong thing that can happen, and no plan to keep on track.

The subdued red, white, and blue tie was a nice touch.

A small lesson: the person who crosses his arm over his body in a photo is generally perceived to be the weak one; they are seen as conscious of their vulnerability, and guarded. That’s a big reason that Romney looks so defeated here. Be sure to be the one to reach across the open space, and not your body.

Romney’s IT consulting

One last thing about struck me about the race.

Ars Techicna has the story.

I’d just like to point out that Romney’s approach to building a mission critical infrastructure was the same he has used for decades: bring in consultants, outsource, and do as little as possible in-house.

Executives get tremendous rewards for this: their friends love being hired as consultants and contractors. Their investors and fellow board members smile upon this back scrubbing. Everyone gets paid, everyone gets to play, and everyone is happy.

Except sometimes the product utterly fails.

Romney decided to go the outsource/contract model. This meant that lots of people were working on this project, not necessarily communicating efficiently, and not necessarily solely on this project. They also had a much lower stake in it.

Contrast this with Obama’s team: they built their infrastructure from the ground up, and had intimate knowledge of it. Since it was their only project, the had complete investment. And since they were completely invested, they cared about the goal and function of the product, which was to get Obama reelected.

This is why team Obama had two backup plans in place the night of the election, and team Romney had nothing.

But everyone got paid!

Protest too much

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/linda-mcmahon-vote-for-obama.php

Actually, the biggest indicator of an impending Obama victory are the strories that his opposition are currently telling to explain his victory:

  • That Hurricane Sandy killed Mitt’s momentum, or,
  • that rampant voter fraud will steal the election, or,
  • that Governor Christie put Obama over the top with his praise, or,
  • that when Obama win, he won’t have a mandate becuase he didn’t win over a majority of whites, and
  • so on.

There will be others.But the point is to be ready for the moment when it happens — conservatives will naturally look to their leaders for an explanation. And they’d better have a convincing one, or there will be hell to pay.

The end

We have entered that weird limnal state in political elections — where anything seems possible, and the news media has nothing to report on for a good two or three cycles.

First, a final prediction (I made some long range predictions some time ago — I’ll revisit them soon): Obama is going to be president by the end of the day tomorrow. Much of this is gut, but also a pretty simple entropy calculation. Simply: how many different paths to victory does a candidate have? If you give Romney FL and NC, then Obama has 66 paths, as opposed to Romney’s 58.

You can check my math here, at the NYT Politics section.

If Obama simply wins Ohio, his score improves to 244:11. Conversely, if Romney takes Ohio, then the score is 187:65. Obama still has nearly three times the path to victory.

And remember, at this point, Obama is more likely to win FL and NC than Romney is to win VA. And as my father has said,

“If you’re a Republican and you can’t win the home of the Confederacy, then you can’t win shit.”

Sage advice.

Horseman

The body language was straight forward: Romney was as polished as he was aggressive, and the President seemed tired. Romney apparently spent hours working on his smile and posture. If anything, it was over polished, and it was one part of what made a difference.

Romney’s debate strategy delivered.

It’s called “Shotgunning”, or the “Gish Gallop”. That is, loading up a magazine of claims, more than your opponent can respond to, and blasting him with it in a short amount of time. Romney’s magazine contained numerous … unsupported assertions. The idea is to manufacture the appearance of winning by making your opponent look like he doesn’t know what he is doing and is incapable of mustering answers. E.g.: that he shouldn’t be here in the first place. This isn’t about substance. It is doing things to be seen doing things; it’s bullshit.

And it worked.

The best thing you can do if you are being overrun, is to point out your opponent’s strategy, and then decide what points you want to respond to. “Well, since my opponent is trying to bury me under a mountain of half-truths, you’ll excuse me if I only respond to the relevant points.” This puts the galloper in a rough spot - he can break off his charge and demand that you answer his points, which demonstrates weakness, or he can gallop on and disrespect the audience.

You can often divide these sorts of appeals into appeals of the heart and appeals to the head. Roughly speaking, when you opponent leads with one, you should emphasize the other. What we saw on Wednesday night from both men were almost exclusively appeals to the head - I was swimming in a soup of numbers just 20 minutes in. The President could have switched the battleground to emotional appeals. Personal stories, ”I met a woman in Spokane with two …”, things with people attached to them.

This implies, “You know what? I know my opponent thinks that his ideas are important - but lets talk about what is really important.” It does not matter if you switch from head to heart, or heart to head: the switch is what matters.

That isn’t, however, Obama’s forte. He is a wonk, as is Mitt Romney. Most politicians are big nerds. Clinton is really the only politician that mastered both arguments from the head and the heart.

So, Romney won this debate. He out-wonked the wonk, and looked great doing it.

It isn’t going to do him a lot of good. There are two more debates coming, and we didn’t learn much about Romney at this debate, other than he likes to change who he is. I’d guess that most of his movement in the polls has been Republicans coming back into the fold.

If the question is: who are these men? (And that was really the only question moderator Leher bothered to ask). We know that the President had a bad night, but we know him well enough to know that wasn’t him at the top of his game. This would have been a real disaster if Obama lacked a four year track record. Today, it simply sucks. And we now know that Romney is a mercurial character who is, somehow, able to come off polished but without revealing who he really is.

That isn’t going to be enough to get him to the oval office. Americans will forgive a weak performance in a man they know well. See also George W. Bush. We need to know the authentic man.

The bottom line: this is the best Romney has done yet, and he is still losing.

What to look for tonight

The Internet is awash with articles about what to look for in tonight’s presidential debates. Will Romney try to land some zingers? Will he appear moe empathetic? Will the president get knocked back on his heels?

They’re all wrong. Because they’re telling you what to listen for, not look for.

Take a look at the body language — your brain will be doing this for you anyhow. A quick class:

Don’t look for single gestures, like crossed arms = defensive. People get cold, you know. Gestures come in groups.

Don’t look for meaning — that’s high brain stuff. This is all lower brain lizard stuff. Assign yourself a simple question like, “Is he being defensive?” And stick with it. This will prevent you from looking for evidence support a theory.

Turn the sound off. Then their words will not distract you.

Both of these men are thinkers - they lead with the head, not the crotch — and I’ve learned that thinkers have a hard time with body language. Rey typically work to conceal it, not use it. This can lead to interesting reveals.

An amazing judo throw

They say that bill Clinton was the first black president. It may be that Obama is the first Asian president. Allow me to explain. I’ll start with what Romney did.

Years ago, Romney saw that all he had to do to win the Republican nomination was to correctly position himself and coast through. Everyone who was going to run was nuts, or simply lacked the big money resources and connection that Romney could draw on. So he positioned himself as the only one who could possibly win anyone in the middle. After carefully examining all of the other narrative-based candidates, Republican voters agreed that crazy-go-nuts wasn’t a viable strategy, even though it was what they really wanted.

And so, with very little fanfare, Mitt Romney won the Republican nomination. This is all very Wu Wei, in that All the work was done years ago and Romney simply had to show up to win the nomination.

Up to this point Romney has been running the same sort of flavorless, vanilla campaign got him through the early months. He has been coasting on the idea that the economy would drag the president out of the white house for him.* This was to be a referendum on the president, “has Obama done a good job”, and it was best to have narrative at all, to offer no vision, so that the total public focus was on the president. Why have a narrative, if the only one your party will allow is bat-shit crazy? Why have a narrative, if it only distracts from your strategy.

At the time, I argued that people don’t vote for a man without a story, or a story about America. I was both right and wrong.

Romney’s strategy hasn’t turned out well. I expected that the president would come through with a soaring narrative. He hasn’t, and for good reason: Republicans will never let him deliver on it in congress. So why have one? Why have a narrative, if it will only remind people of the things you haven’t accomplished.

Obama has essentially run on his record of quiet competence, letting his brand, and the Republican brand speak for themselves.

This is, essentially, Mitt Romney’s strategy. Except that Obama is well known, and well liked by the public. He is also a more capable politician.

So, Obama, by adopting Romney’s strategy, has made this a choice election. Since there is no narrative, there is no debate about the direction of the country. This has drive an intense curiosity about Romney, much to his detriment; his unwillingness to make himself the center of attention has allowed the process to paint him as an etch-a-sketch-y Mr. Burns villain.

So there it is. As much as I hate to admit it, the lack of narrative in this campaign is the driving, and deciding factor. Obama’s judo move of adopting his opponents strategy is currently blowing my mind!

*He even seems to have really thought that this was all he had to do. In the 47 second video, he claims that the economy will get better simply if he is elected, full stop. Of course, he knows that most models forecast about 6% growth over the next four years, meaning anyone will be able to claim the recovery.

Barney Frank has transitioned nicely into “Old man holding forth” mode. And again, why is Romney running for anything? What does he get out of it?

Do you remember what John McCain’s big story was? The story he told that really shaped who he was? Do you recall John Kerry’s big story? Probably not — you probably recall a medal tossing, wind surfing rich-boy/hippie. Or maybe just an old, angry man. Neither developed a narrative before their opponents forced one on them. Bad narratives stick around. They suck. Neither McCain nor Kerry developed a narrative that answered these questions: Why do you want to be President? Why do you deserve to be President? How is your story anything like my story? Every successful bid for President answers those questions. But Romney hasn’t. I couldn’t tell you what his story was if you tortured me with DBZ reruns.  More than that, Romeny has to string together the big parts of his life’s story: his fortune, his sharky CEO-ness, his Mormon faith, and so on. None of those things are a disadvantage if said with back bone. But it looks like his plan is to remain vague and mysterious. That ain’t a winner, Mitt. If I can’t trust you to stand up for yourself, how can I trust you to stand up for me? If he maintains the current course, I’m guessing Obama by 3% by November 11.
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Do you remember what John McCain’s big story was? The story he told that really shaped who he was?

Do you recall John Kerry’s big story?

Probably not — you probably recall a medal tossing, wind surfing rich-boy/hippie. Or maybe just an old, angry man. Neither developed a narrative before their opponents forced one on them. Bad narratives stick around. They suck.

Neither McCain nor Kerry developed a narrative that answered these questions:

Why do you want to be President?

Why do you deserve to be President?

How is your story anything like my story?

Every successful bid for President answers those questions. But Romney hasn’t. I couldn’t tell you what his story was if you tortured me with DBZ reruns. 

More than that, Romeny has to string together the big parts of his life’s story: his fortune, his sharky CEO-ness, his Mormon faith, and so on. None of those things are a disadvantage if said with back bone.

But it looks like his plan is to remain vague and mysterious. That ain’t a winner, Mitt. If I can’t trust you to stand up for yourself, how can I trust you to stand up for me?

If he maintains the current course, I’m guessing Obama by 3% by November 11.

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