Month: September 2008

OXFORD, MS. —

The two men appeared without
warning on center stage of the Gertrude Ford Center, and, as Kirk began to speak
– declaiming such phrases as “The stakes could not be higher” and “the
complexities that lie before us” and “serious choices that face the nation” and
“it is in our power to decide,” he might have been taken (and was, by this
observer) to be someone out there to check the mikes for sound.

Only as Kirk’s string of
boilerplate continued did it become obvious that the embedded clichés were his
speech, not something done to facilitate a sound-check. Fahrenkopf’s follow-up
was not much more enlightening, though his prediction that “this will be the
most widely watched debate ever” was a fairly heady announcement. [Update: The debate would draw 52.4 million viewers, far fewer than the record audience of 80.6 million for President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan in 1980.)

• On Thursday, when two Ole Miss students had stood at the
  same lecterns as McCain and Obama would an evening later, running through a
  simulated debate for such purposes as a sound-check and lighting-check,
  their improvised lines seemed both crisper and more original.

  When the two students arrived on stage, incidentally, their exchange of
  handshakes and pleasantries (“Have a nice trip down? Good”) would make a
  pointed contrast to that which took place a day later between the two
  presidential candidates. Obama mouthed similar amenities, but McCain barely
  nodded as the two contenders touched gloves.

• Then there was Jim Lehrer, the veteran PBS hand, who
  came on as every inch the ex-Marine when he lectured the audience beforehand
  about demonstrations. Noting that one side of the auditorium consisted of
  Obama supporters and the other of McCain’s people, Lehrer virtually
  tongue-lashed them in advance, cautioning that the debate wasn’t “a pep rally”
  and warning against any “cheering or hollering.”

  He said he wouldn’t stand for any unprompted audience sound of any kind and
  would stop the debate in mid-stream if need be to call out any offenders.
  Plus, he would take time away from the candidate whose side of the auditorium
  had offended.

  That last would come to seem an empty threat, given the free-form debate that
  followed, with no apparent equal-time provisions for responses and frequent
  improvisations and interruptions from Lehrer as well as from the two
  candidates.

• One of the facts of life which have irked supporters of
  the Obama-Biden ticket in Memphis – the lack of such logistical niceties as
  yard signs and bumper stickers, both of which commodities are freely available
  to McCain-Palin backers – was reflected in the media tent Friday night during
  the debate.

Even as the journalists studied
their screens or scribbled or wrote notes about the proceedings, young charges
kept bringing them freshly prepared response sheets from the Republican point of
view to whatever tack the debate happened to be taking. There was no equivalent
on the Democratic side.

• Various on-campus hosts were at pains to treat the horde
  of visiting media right. Along with the swag bags made available by Ole Miss
  and the Commission on Presidential Debates were additional goodie bags
  furnished by Wal-Mart.

  Though media credentials were strictly monitored for site-access purposes by
  campus cops and the Secret Service, there was a lot of looking-the-other-way
  governing the swag bags, which were loaded with sundries, candies, earphones,
  flash drives, notebooks, commemorative T-shirts, etc., etc. The greatest prize
  of all seemed to be Ole Miss caps.

  There were numerous booths, vans, exhibits for the curious, and donors like
  Anheuser-Busch, which maintained a food-and-drink tent nearby the media
  facilities, offered exotic enough fare — Portobello mushrooms, Italian sausage
  cheeseburgers, German beer and French wine — to attract politicians like
  Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and his Michigan colleague Carl Levin.

  Not least among the bounties in this provender-laden tent were Rendezvous
  ribs, personally supervised and served by restaurateur John Vergos himself.

• Former Memphian Babs Chase, now head of foreign press
  for the State Department, shepherded around Oxford a large corps of
  journalists from various countries around the globe. Sitting at a picnic
  table Thursday night on the lawn of the University’s journalism facilities and
  dining on Southern-fried specialties were Sulaiman Alamin, from the Sudan;
  Ole Nyeng of Denmark; and Jean-Marc Veszely of Belgium.

  All were frank to say they hoped for an Obama victory — a reminder of the
  McCain strategy of trying to stigmatize the Democratic candidate’s support as
  reflecting a foreign consensus rather than a Middle American one. But all three
  journalists made it clear they were motivated less by any “celebrity” of
  Obama’s than by fear and loathing concerning what they see as the disasters of
  the eight-year Bush administration.

  But, asked who they thought would win, the three split, with only Nyend, the
  Dane, opining in favor of Obama. Veszely was not prepared to pronounce, and
  Alamin refused to believe that Americans would actually vote for someone with
  African ancestry. He saw McCain as the victor, primarily on racial grounds.

“Things here have not changed that much,” said the Sudanese free-lancer, though
his point would have been disputed by Chancellor Robert Khayat and other
University of Mississippi officials, who did their best all week to convince the
media, foreign and domestic, that things had indeed changed, not only in America
at large but even at Ole Miss itself, once a very citadel of segregation but now
struggling to redefine itself, in the words of a letter from Khayat that
appeared in every media press packet, as “a nurturing and diverse community
where people of all races, religions, nationalities, economic groups, and
political alliances live, study, and work comfortably together.”

Now that‘s something that no major Mississippi official, governmental or
academic, would have said backaways.

See also “Win, Lose, or Draw? How McCain-Obama #1 Went.” and “Oxford turns the Presidential Debate into a Political, er, Party.”

OXFORD, MS — The spinners started doing their business
well in advance of Friday night’s long-awaited – and almost canceled – first
presidential debate. There was South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham holding
forth in the “Spin Alley” section of the media tent confiding that he had told
fellow Republican John McCain, “I said he could say something critical about
Obama. Just don’t overdo it.”

That was either disingenuous or revealing or both. Much of
what was said was predictable, especially when the politician spinners were
asked about the pending congressional deal on a financial rescue package — the one that, depending on party and perspective, Senator McCain either almost blocked or helped to facilitate with his on-again, off-again attitude toward appearing.

John Kerry, when asked if he was ready to sign
off on the package, said, “Yeah. Tomorrow.” Queried about the four particulars
that Democratic candidate Barack Obama wanted as add-ons to the bailout bill,
the Democrats’ 2004 standard-bearer was emphatic. “All of them” were included,
he said. But…pause: Mississippi-One, Mississippi, Two…it turned out that he wasn’t
sure about Obama’s wish for a surefire way to re-negotiate mortgages for
home-owners in danger of foreclosure.

Nobody seemed real sure, but they all professed nervous
optimism that a package was coming which everybody could feel good about.

They felt the same way about the debate, talking a
civics-text line about the likelihood of candid but friendly exchanges. Novelist
and sometime Oxford resident John Grisham was advising otherwise on such of the
several LCD screens that filled the cavernous room, seven to a row, as were
showing MSNBC.(Fox and CNN each had their watchers too.) “I expect them to be
combative.” As a “lifelong yellow dog Democrat,” he said to host David Gregory,
he feared that Obama would be too passive. The reason: The Illinois senator,
like Grisham, had taught law and might be inclined to be “condescending.”

As for the pols themselves out in the tent, they tended to favor the chances of whichever candidate shared the same party label as themselves. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani thought McCain would do just swell, and governor Bill Richardson, a Democrat who had nursed presidential hopes himself, was more negative toward the Arizonan, whom he blamed for exacerbating the financial emergency with his mid-week insistence on returning to Washington to participate in the ongoing bailout talks.

Unlike Grisham, another Mississippi Democrat, former Governor Ray Mabus, fairly brimmed with confidence for Obama when he ambled through Spin
Alley — if not on style points Friday night, then at least regarding the Democrat’s election-day chances
in red-state Mississippi. “I think there’s still some resentment here toward
McCain’s almost scuttling this thing,” Mabus said.

The former governor extended that optimism to the rest of
the Democratic field running in Mississippi this year, including another
Democratic governor, Ronnie Musgrove, who’s going for the Senate against
Republican Roger Wicker, the former congressman appointed by GOP governor Haley
Barbour to fill the seat vacated by Trent Lott.

“Just look at what Childers did!” noted Mabus, meaning
Travis Childers, the Democrat who defeated Southaven mayor Greg Davis in a
series of interim elections earlier this year to determine who would succeed Wicker in Congress. As
Mabus pointed out, Childers’ vote kept rising, fast enough to overcome an
ever-mounting vote for Davis as well.

“I think things are finally balancing out here,” Mabus
said.

That was something that obviously remained to be seen, and
it might well depend on what ended up happening later Thursday in the Gertrude
Ford Center for the Performing Arts next door.

After “postponing” his campaign to help solve the financial crisis and leaving tonight’s debate in Oxford at loose ends, John McCain announced this morning he will attend the debate after all.

From his statement: “The McCain campaign is resuming all activities and the Senator will travel to the debate this afternoon. Following the debate, he will return to Washington to ensure that all voices and interests are represented in the final agreement, especially those of taxpayers and homeowners.”

Read the full statement at the Washington Post.

More coverage, including on-site reporting from the debate, to come.