This is Buzz Bissinger, an American journalist and author whose advice on writing is that
"you have to be brutally honest." Bissinger was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his investigative reporting of the corrupt Philadelphia court system. In 1990, Bissinger published
Friday Night Lights, a non-fiction book about an intense, West Texas, high school football program, which has since become a multi-media franchise. This morning,
in an article for the Daily Beast, Bissinger, a "lifelong Democrat," endorsed Mitt Romney for President of the United States.
For Bissinger, the final straw in an apparently long but understated series of disappointments with the president came during last Wednesday's much ado'ed-about presidential debate—both Romney’s performance,
“The tipping point was
last week’s debate in Denver. Romney finally did what he should have done all
along instead of his balky cha cha with the old white men of the conservative
Republican wing: he acted as the moderate he is, for the first time running as
himself…”
and Obama’s,
“I have never seen a
performance worse than Obama’s, distracted, his head dipped into the podium as
if avoiding the smell of something rotten.”
The crux of Bissinger's argument is that, unlike Obama, Romney actually wants to be president (he could be reminded of the common wisdom of democracy, that an ideal ruler is the one
best qualified and
least desirous for the job). He feels that Obama seemed burnt out, weary of the political schmoozing and unable to compromise his principles to work constructively with the opposition. Finally, Romney has, to Bissinger's delight, finally flipped back to
moderate.
I want to avoid discussing the debate in much detail. Romney won by the only metric that politically matters: appearance. When you watched the debate, it looked like Romney was nailing it. Thursday-morning fact-checkers told a more complicated story, but there's no instant replay rule in politics. Any other political criticisms I have for Romney are shouted-over by his
undeniably enormous bounce in the polls. It doesn't matter much that he has only come up with "pledges," not actual plans with details that experts can analyze and Americans can thoughtfully weigh against our values; that he thinks public broadcasting gets too much money while oil subsidies, a much larger sum, are insignificant; or that many of the points he scored were factually inaccurate or inconsistent his opinions of a week before. The winner of a debate is always the candidate who appears to win. The sad reality is that ours is a culture that feels the best way to watch a verbal contest is with the sound turned off. We are a culture that increasingly views its politics cleverly, not carefully.
I am one of those few who believes that the best way to "watch" a debate is by reading the transcript the next day. There are still a few dinosaurs around who believe the worst thing to happen to the presidential debate was when television took it away from radio. My girlfriend points out that there were those who thought the damage already done when radio took it away from the newspapers.
Mitt Romney has leapt up the polls because of people like Buzz Bissinger. I don't mean Pulitzer Prize winners or anyone at all likely to write 1500 highly-visible words describing both their ideological journey and their apparently revelatory TV-viewing experience on one fateful night in October. Personally, I think that, now that he's older and established and wealthy, Bissinger just kind of wants to vote Republican and he wants a excuse that has nothing to do with greed.
No, I mean anyone of that chimerical demographic of voting-elligible Americans who, less than a month from the election, somehow consider themselves insufficiently informed of the two most reportable men in the world and were unable to come to a decision by Tuesday of last week. I would have liked to believe that this inexplicable cross-section of the country is uneducated, uninterested, and unlikely to change that between now and November 6th. I wonder how many more like Bissinger are out there, swayed from a lifetime of support for a political ideology, a belief about the role of government and of obligations to the governed, by a single poor performance viewed in a narrow light.
To me, Romney said one truly remarkable thing during the debate that has not gotten the coverage it deserves. When confronted with his lack of policy specifics, he did not try to contend that he has a solid plan. Instead, Romney argued that going in without a plan is actually the more effective management strategy.
Buzz Bissinger is convinced that Romney is a moderate again because he's becoming one a month before the election. He is disappointed with Obama and believes that Romney is a generally capable man. He believes that he knows what a President Romney is going to do.
I study politics and write this blog because I honestly believe that conservatives have values too, that they come by them honestly and intelligently and that they have a duty to disagree. I, however, am a liberal. I believe that everyone should be treated equitably and that the systemically marginalized should be systematically protected. I believe that governing smart is better than governing less. I believe that voter suppression is unpatriotic, even when you are told that you might lose. I believe that economic stimulus of the sort opposed by many within the Republican party saved this economy from the razor's edge. I believe in managed markets and that taking slow steps in the right direction is preferable to sprinting off without a map.
If Buzz Bissinger ever believed any of those things, I would hope that somewhere between the lines of his
Daily Beast article, there were more compelling arguments that swayed him than what we witnissed in a single exercise in political theater. I hope that there is more to the story than could fit within 1500 words or the narrative of the post-debate news cycle.
