I am a fan of the television series Survivor, and I sometimes wonder if other politically interested people are also fans of that show.
In many ways, the presidential election is the ultimate game of Survivor, with candidates being voted off the island in the primaries, leading up to the general election of the Sole Survivor.
Any fan of Survivor will tell you that every season, on the first episode, there is one person who emerges as an immediate defunct leader on each tribe. Once that person is acknowledged as the leader by their tribe members, he or she immediately becomes the first person targeted by the other tribe members as someone to vote off.
This “Survivor Effect,” for lack of a better term, is why I think President Obama threw last Wednesday’s first presidential debate.
Yes, I said he threw the debate. He took a dive. In other words, he intentionally lost. But why would the president do such a thing? In Survivor terms: to avoid being voted off of the island.
For about three weeks leading up to this past Wednesday’s debate, the national media narrative had been largely that Obama was building up an unstoppable lead.
Some were asking if the race was already over based on poll projections that showed Obama leading by as much as 10 points in crucial battleground states like Ohio.
This kind of narrative could be potentially lethal to Obama’s campaign because people like an underdog, and politics is all about perception.
If all the media started talking about was how Obama already had the election in the bag, then many people would start to perceive him as overconfident, maybe even cocky and, in our culture, we will only tolerate this kind of arrogance to a certain point before we feel it is our civic duty to tear that person down.
We see this all the time in the movie, music, and professional sports industries. We hype a star up, put them on a pedestal, and then scrutinize their every move until we find one fault that we can pounce on. Then we rip that person a new rear orifice and bring them back down to earth.
There is little that our culture loves more than to see some cocky so-and-so get his or her comeuppance.
When viewed through that spectrum, it makes perfect sense for the president to “take one for the team,” and hold back during the first presidential debate. The strategy is clear to me: Throw the first debate, let Romney become the perceived front runner for the next two debates that will take place within the next month, and then Obama can be the dragon slayer instead of the slain dragon.
That is why Obama didn’t call Romney out on some of the patently false statements he made during the debate, like when he said that his tax plan would not increase taxes by $5 trillion.
According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, that was not true. They said that Romney’s tax plan would raise taxes on the middle class by $4.8 trillion over a ten year period.
Between this year’s GOP primaries and 2008’s Democratic primary contest, I have watched both Romney and Obama debate other candidates many times. While both are skilled debaters, looking back on their previous debates, I see nothing that would predict that Romney could ever win a debate with Obama.
The president stammered and searched for the points that he wanted to make, like I have never seen him do in any other debate — and those others were against Hillary Clinton, a formidable opponent for any candidate. I feel like this leaves only two options: either his heart just was not in it, or he lost the debate on purpose.
Timing is everything in politics. If you peak too early, you risk losing the wind from your sails before Election Day, and if you peak too late you’re Al Gore. The trick is to be peaking in popularity and positive public relations right as people are going to the polls to vote.
The Obama campaign probably felt like Obama was peaking too early and was going to end up being that defunct leader on Survivor who emerges to the front of the tribe too soon and consequently forces his still-uncertain tribe to vote him off the island first.
Hopefully Obama’s first debate performance will actually be what saves him and makes him sole survivor of this election.
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