Experts: Debate pressures unprecedented

[Ron Burgundy]

On the eve of the first presidential debate of the general election, it’s anyone’s guess what John McCain and Barack Obama have running through their heads.

Thanks to this week’s bailout negotiations on Capitol Hill and McCain’s Wednesday request for a postponement of tonight’s debate, the Republican and Democratic nominees are preparing to take the debate stage under more chaotic circumstances than any other presidential contenders in recent history.

As they stand across from each other at the University of Mississippi, they will have to block out all the noise of the last few days in order to focus on the task at hand: winning the night.

“There’s an almost Zen-like state that, if you’re a debater, you want to put yourself into,” said Alan Schroeder, a Northeastern University professor and historian of presidential debates. “To have all this hysteria swirling around, [it] would not seem to be the ideal circumstance in which to get your focus together for a debate.”

Schroeder said the confusion that has surrounded this Friday’s debate was historically unprecedented, noting that both candidates have been deprived of valuable time for preparation.

“Obama was pretty much going to stay down in Tampa through the week,” Schroeder explained. “McCain’s prep time was never quite as rigorous and as intensive, but it became even less so after all of this melodrama began.”

"It's an intense experience to begin with," said Dan Schnur, an adviser to McCain's 2000 presidential campaign who is not affiliated with any campaign this year. "It's even more intense when you're sprinting from the airport to the debate site."

"Naturally you want your candidate in a cocoon for the better part" of debate day, Schnur continued. "Neither candidate goes into tonight with that kind of preparation."

Robert Barnett, a lawyer at Williams and Connolly who has been involved in presidential debate preparation since 1976, said he’d never seen a situation where important details were in flux so late in the game. “No, no. Never happened,” he said.

But Barnett noted that Obama and McCain both had extensive experience in debate settings.

A lot of the training, if you will, a lot of the preparing is preparing for the unique format of presidential debates,” Barnett said. “You find ways to express your opinions, your plans, your hopes in the artificial context of 30-second answers, 60-second answers.”

Barnett conceded that the candidates might have preferred a calmer run-up to the debate, but he added that contenders for the presidency should be able to perform under pressure.

“I think that if a candidate is not able to focus on a presidential debate, in light of the events of the last couple days, that candidate is not as well qualified as he might be to be president of the United States,” said Barnett, who is a Democrat.

“They’ve also been through so many primary debates,” added Schroeder. “I do think they’ll be able to refocus.”

In case external circumstances weren’t putting enough pressure on McCain and Obama, both campaigns tried to apply some extra heat to the opposition on Friday afternoon.

Around 2 p.m., Obama spokesman Bill Burton sent a memo to reporters trying to raise the bar for McCain’s performance in the debate.

"If he slips up, makes a mistake or fails to deliver a game-changing performance, it will be a serious blow to his campaign,” the memo read. “Given his unsteady performance this week, he desperately needs to win this debate in a big way in order to change the topic and get back to his home turf.”

McCain’s campaign hit back, with spokesman Michael Goldfarb calling Burton’s memo “a last-minute attempt to lower expectations for his candidate in tonight’s debate.”

source: Politico - http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080926/pl_politico/13995 [link]