Here was the neatest thing about being in the media tent adjacent to the site of last night’s presidential debate: the ribs from Rendezvous, downtown Memphis’s famous barbecue restaurant, were free and abundant. So was the beer, pretty much everything Anheuser-Busch makes, draft or bottled.
A close second: seeing that nearly every political and media figure looks worse in person than on television — older, paler, more wrinkly and, in most cases, considerably shorter. At a certain age, this becomes a guilty pleasure.
Here’s the worst thing about being in the tent: You really are sealed in an information bubble, into which news from the world you’re supposed to be covering barely intrudes.
Case in point.
Throughout the entire debate, the consensus among the press people sitting around me was that McCain was cleaning Obama’s clock. (Translation: They thought voters were thinking that McCain was cleaning Obama’s clock.) Afterward, we all fast-walked over to the part of the tent once known colloqially, but now formally, as spin alley. (Yes, there were posters directing us to Spin Alley.) The campaigns sent out their spinmeisters, each of them heralded by a sign bearer lifting high his or her name and candidate. Reporters crowded around to hear the McCain spinners say, in response to encouraging questions (sample: “So are you feeling good about how things went?”), that their man had won an unalloyed victory and to hear Obama’s spinners respond to hectoring questions (“What will he do differently in the next debate?”) that it hadn’t been that bad after all.
About a half hour into this process a CBS monitor flashed the results of the network’s postdebate poll of undecided voters, which showed that Obama had won by about 40 percent to 22 percent. Reporters looked at each other, turned to the spinners, and starting asking questions of a very different sort. Now it was the McCain team who had some ‘splaining to do, and Obama’s who were encouraged to gloat.
I’ll be at Washington University on Wednesday to give a talk on the vice presidency, and I’ll be haunting the media tent once again on debate night. I wonder what’s for dinner.
