At Obama’s debate rehearsals, held repeatedly through the late summer and with increasing frequency and intensity in September, the role of McCain was played by Gregory Craig—the ace Washington lawyer dubbed as one of “the Kool-Aid boys” by a bemused Obama back in 2006. After urging Obama to run, Craig had become an informal foreign-policy adviser to him. A trial lawyer, Craig was agile and could, if necessary, come on strong. The expectation was that McCain would condescend to Obama as a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, so Craig played his role accordingly. “Do not lecture me about the war,” Craig-as-McCain said, glowering at Obama, in debate prep. “Do not tell me how to deploy men in combat. I was flying a jet over Vietnam when you were in grade school.”
Obama was tutored to seem stern and unflinching, to treat McCain respectfully but to stand up to him. He rehearsed a moment when he could turn to McCain and counterattack—to begin by saying, “You were wrong about Iraq …” and work through a litany of McCain’s misjudgments. The Obama team was sure that McCain would criticize him for having said, in a Democratic debate in the summer of 2007, that he would be willing to meet with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Obama was instructed to point out that McCain was so averse to personal diplomacy that he had declined to meet with the president of Spain. Obama can be a little bloodless and dull in his preternatural calm, but his goofy side showed up at debate prep. He would appear very somber and emphatic when he accosted Craig/McCain for refusing to speak to the president of Spain. “You wouldn’t even talk to the president of Spain!” he would intone with mock gravity. Then he would begin to giggle. He was told that he should attack McCain for saying that it was enough to “muddle through” on Afghanistan. “Muddle through!” Obama would exclaim and dissolve into giggles. It was as if he refused to take the theater of mock indignation too seriously.
Obama never lost his ironic detachment, even when he was preparing for the most important public appearances of his life. A little comic relief was called for. In the carefully prepared world of Obamaland, nothing was left to chance. The rehearsal room in Clearwater, Fla., was an exact replica of the debate stage where Obama met McCain in the first debate at Ole Miss. No detail was overlooked. The podiums were set at the precise angles. Obama rehearsed in the evenings, to match his natural circadian rhythms. For the second debate, a town-hall format, Obama was told to be careful to hold the mike by his side—not straight up in his lap—when he sat down. The same instructions had been given to John Kerry four years ago. It wasn’t hard to persuade the candidates to mind the advice, said an aide; all you had to do was show them a video.
Obama’s debate coach, Michael Sheehan, a veteran of many campaign psychodramas over the years, was struck by the senator’s calmness. The candidate was always in control of his feelings. During one afternoon prep session, Obama begged off. “I’m a little tired and a little cranky,” he told a roomful of aides. “I’m going to my room for a half hour and I’ll be in better shape to work with.” He reappeared 30 minutes later, ready for work. Obama was, as ever, self-possessed—his own best judge of his mood and strength. After a full-dress mock debate in the evening, when it was time to review the tape of his performance, Obama turned to Sheehan and said, “Michael, I’m tired.” He was not complaining, Sheehan recalled; he was just being matter-of-fact. Nothing seemed to rattle Obama. He had a way of retreating into his own little world. During one of the debate preps, the lights blew, flickering on and off like a strobe light from the 1970s disco craze. Obama stood behind the podium, quietly singing the song “Disco Inferno,” last popular in the heyday of “Saturday Night Fever.”
On the day of the first debate, in Jackson, Miss., Obama ate a late lunch with Valerie Jarrett, Eric Whitaker and Marty Nesbitt, his closest Chicago pals. He was serenely calm, Jarrett recalled. He talked about having done everything he’d set out to do; he said he had no regrets. Later, onstage, Obama often politely agreed with McCain (11 times), but he did not let himself be bullied. McCain called his opponent’s ideas “naive” and “dangerous,” but Obama, smiling impassively, did not take the bait. There were no knockdown blows or surprising moments. The drama was more in the nature of a highly stylized Kabuki theater—a kind of playing out of a hoary ritual that was more timeless than topical, more deferential to political tropes (Always praise the goodness of the American people! Do not require them to sacrifice!) than it was responsive to the challenges ahead. In some ways, the candidates seemed oddly irrelevant to the fiscal crisis. Asked if they supported the bailout bill hanging fire in Congress, they both gave tepid endorsements and dodged around the question of whether their campaign promises needed to be tempered in any way.
Political reporters, who tend to score debates as prize fights, were disappointed. Some decreed that McCain had landed the most punches, racked up the most points. But in the public polls that followed the debate, Obama emerged as the consensus winner. He had been the cool and steady one. McCain had seemed at first quite subdued, then a little cranky and peevish at moments. He would not look at Obama despite Lehrer’s admonition to the candidates to directly talk to each other. The overall effect was a role reversal, a flip-flop of predebate expectations: the candidate who looked most “presidential” was Obama.
After the first debate, McCain and his handlers reviewed the videotape. Why, one aide asked him, did you never look at Obama? Because you told me not to! McCain retorted. It was true. McCain’s debate coach, Brett O’Donnell, had noted Obama’s tendency to look directly at an opponent while attacking, and he had instructed McCain not to get sucked in by meeting his gaze. But McCain had taken the advice a little too literally. “We didn’t tell you not to look at him at all,” one aide chided him. (Advisers also told McCain to soften his blows by saying “what my opponent doesn’t understand”— another trope he overused.) The veteran of a thousand morning talk shows, McCain was accustomed to speaking directly to the camera, not to his inquisitor in the studio. But in this case his experience was a liability.
McCain had looked forward to prepping for debates about as much as he did to studying for exams in school. The preparations for the rehearsals were “a mess,” recalled one of his top advisers. The candidate at first resisted debate prep, then couldn’t get enough of it. McCain didn’t settle on Congressman Rob Portman to play the role of Obama until three weeks before the first debate. (Craig had been preparing for his McCain turn for months.) […continued on page 3]