Karen, I’m not taking sides…

I think the song “Karen” by the National is unimpeachable. And it opens with this great line:

Karen, I’m not taking sides
I don’t think I’ll ever do that again
I’ll end up winning and I won’t know why…

And it wasn’t until I was in an argument with Ms. AC a few months after I first heard the song that I realized what those lines mean. I’ve always had this great facility for arguing and debating – one of the things I’ve inherited from Papa Citizen, I guess. I didn’t realize until recently that this is one of the things I don’t trust in myself, because I can never really tell whether I’m making an argument that I really believe in, or if I’m just stretching a bad idea to its logical conclusion because I think the process of doing so – the argument’s unspooling – is elegant enough for me to disregard the outcome.

Basically, being able to debate well, or to score rhetorical points off of an opponent, is ultimately just an unbearable display of sophistry. It shows nothing, ultimately, and in the context or an argument with a loved one, it doesn’t put any admirable traits on display. It suggests that you have been secretly keeping score, and – most damning of all – that you are more invested in winning an argument than in finding a solution. And often times, you just come across as a bully – like this guy, apparently.


This is not a particularly artful statement of what happens in political debates, but it’s the prism through which I’ve always seen them, especially in light of the 2000 and 2004 debates and elections: smartypants win debates at the cost of losing the election.

I had high hopes for this year’s debates, because both candidates were, if nothing else, quick on their feet. And yet the clearest thought I could articulate after that first debate was that Obama, disappointingly, lacked a killer instinct, because he seemed never to want to land punches. I thought it made him seem unready or unwilling to fight – never a trait Americans want out of a president, I’m told - but the metanarrative has congealed around the notion that Obama is “unflappable,” “cool,” etc. Whether by design or not, this is one hell of a lucky break for the man.

Obama’s debate-mode also surprised me because someone who was clearly so comfortable with nuance and non-binary thinking should, I thought, be able to deliver some beautiful rhetorical jiu-jitsu, and would have to do so in order to prove himself ready for the proverbial “highest office in the land.” Either I was dead wrong and Obama doesn’t know how to do this, or he doesn’t think he has to in order to win the election. But what impresses me, I guess, is that he doesn’t feel the need to prove, to those of us who want to see him do it, that he can do it. He seems to lack the insecurity that typically lurks behind the brainy façade of so many bookish types: the fear of being mistaken for mediocre, routine, and the need to deliver an occasional flash of brilliance.

Even more confusingly, Obama seems happy to be a mediocre debater. I’m not sure if this is how he’s chosen to manage his brand (more on that in a later post, I think) or if he is just that calm and collected. And I’m not sure whether this was his plan all along, or whether it was just a perfect combination of circumstance – certainly much can be made of the fact that voters seem to want something stable and flat during times of uncertainty. Though it still doesn’t explain why I walk away from every debate feeling as though I’m about to see a bump for McCain and find instead that the populace at large feels overwhelmingly that Obama carried the day.