The Boxer Rebellion

No, it doesn't quite fit, but you try to pass up describing a political head-to-head bout involving somebody named Boxer without trying to cram it into some sort of pugilistic pun.

According to Gabe Malor's recap, the fifteen-rounder between the California Madame and Carly Fiorina was not so much a draw as a feeling-out encounter.  Boxer basically didn't have anything to say, and was left with a choice of taking shots at Fiorina's Hewlett-Packard CEO tenure or offering a defiantly autistic defense of the self-same Obama agenda the even large pluralities of Golden staters loathe.  True to her leadership skills, she did both, and badly.

Fiorina confirmed her spottiness on pretty much every non-economic issue other than abortion, where she took a surprising federalist stance.  But we've been over this one before - no "true conservative" can win statewide in California, as even Sarah Palin recognized when she backed Fiornia.  She's the best we're going to do there, and that best would be a stupendous improvement over the status quo.

Evidently Carly's problem was the same one President Reagan suffered from in the first 1984 debate with Walter Mondale: overpreparation.  Dutch had all sorts of facts and figures and stats at his command, but in the process of regurgitating them the big picture forest got lost in the arborial shuffle, and he emerged the consensus loser.  He was even shivved as having looked and sounded "old".  What was the needed remedy?  To "let Reagan be Reagan".  To get back to the big picture that had gotten him to the crushing lead he already enjoyed, and for which Mondale had no answer.

For Fiorina, the big picture message was, "You want jobs to come back to California? Cut taxes, cut regulation".  But after mentioning it as a preface, she never really got back to it, getting bogged down in all that preparation.  Unlike the Gipper, though, Carly is the challenger, and thus it was more important for her to hammer away on that central message whenever possible.

It's the difference between a "formal" (i.e. high school team) debate scored and graded technically on points and a combined press conference.  Modern political campaign debates are the latter, not the former, and mistaking the two gets you these missed opportunities.  Again, for the challenger these are invaluable opportunities to not just contrast yourself with the incumbent but speak directly to the voters with your core message.  Over and over and over.  Be repetitive.  Pound it, and your opponent, into the ground, and into the voter's individual and collective consciousness.  And if Babsy makes a boo-boo, so much the better.

Tonight, Carly Fiorina didn't get the job done.  But at least Senator M'am threw her a mulligan:

 It appears that her recollection of that conversation with Condi Rice has diverged dramatically over the past three years from the one that actually transpired:

Now I am the last person on the planet to cut Barbara F'ing Boxer any slack at all, but I do have some direct experience with trying to remember the details of conversations from years in the past, and I can "testify" to the way that memories can get "seasoned" as they settle into your engram neurons in the marinade of subsequent and related events.  You're certain you said this and they said that, and then you see the transcript and you said that and they said this.  And when you're under oath, certitude is at a premium, and equally as hard to come by.

Two differences in the Madame's case, though:

(1) Her memory divergence is a lot wider than just the particular choices of words; it's about as different an exchange as she and the SecState could have had and still have been discussing the same topic.   I don't have any trouble seeing what happened in that windy, cobwebby belfry that suffices for her mind: the actual encounter with Secretary Rice was an embarrassment, so she just made up a different one in which Condi pissed herself instead.  Psychological problem solved, mammoth ego assuaged.

(2) She's a United frakking States frakking Senator with more staffers than I've got fat cells.  If she wants a transcript of that 2007 Foreign Relations Committee hearing to be updated and prepared for this S.F. Chronicle editorial board meeting, it oughtn't have been to difficult for her to order up and skim through.F

Or perhaps, to Ensign Ed's point, she did, and decided she liked her "reimagined" version better and is stubbornly sticking with it.

So I guess Boxer can spend the next few weeks re-fighting Roe v. Wade yet again, while Fiorina can poll California voters on whether they think their senior senator is (1) a pathetic liar or (2) a demented, emotionally "wobbly" [heh] crone.

Should make the next debate...fascinating.