THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING BORING….Barack Obama has another 2-minute ad running. Jonathan Stein says it’s pretty dull (“I tuned out at 0:42”), but that being dull is the whole point:
Obama is presenting himself as the boring choice in this financial crisis. To the extent that boring correlates with responsible, adult, and steady, Obama wins. And with Obama’s poll numbers looking the way they are, that appears to be a correlation worth betting on.
I think I’d take this even further, addressing Ross Douthat’s surprise that Obama won last week’s debate at the same time. The key insight is this: lots of ordinary viewers enjoy a bit of policy wonkishness. We political junkies, even those of us who enjoy policy discussions, don’t. We’ve heard it a million times before.
But most viewers haven’t, and they find it kind of interesting, the same way they mostly liked Bill Clinton’s endless laundry list State of the Union addresses. They don’t hear this kind of thing very often, and when they do it’s a nice change of pace from the daily soundbites on the evening news, which are hard to put together into a coherent understanding of what each candidate stands for. Hearing it all in one piece is a bit of a revelation.
Needless to say, this can be overdone. And a financial crisis is an unusually good time for a sober, wonky address to the voters. But we shouldn’t be too surprised that it works well both in ads and in debates. Voters like being treated like adults more than most of us give them credit for.
