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Wednesday, October 17,
2012 - Volume 3, Number 14 © Copyright 2012, The Ultrapolis Project. All Rights Reserved.
2nd
Presidential Debate Plays Out as UWF&R Forecast Observations on Being Civil or Fighting Back; Also,
UWF&R Forecast on Obama Police Action Gets Legs By Marco
Antonio Roberts
Sometimes No One Wants the Good Guy I won’t get too detailed on
what happened last night. By the time
you read this, you will have heard a magnified version of what
transpired. But, UWFR said yesterday the
performance gap between the two would be less (but as the last time, would be
magnified), and it was. We said Obama
was more likely to rid himself of his internal demons, regain his footing;
that he would have the edge, and more than likely be perceived as the
winner. Lastly, last week we said
that Romney was unlikely to do any better than he did the first time around. All this turned out to be the case. One personal observation: many
are commenting or even complaining on how the two presidential candidates
risked making themselves unlikable to women and undecided voters when they
argued and talked over each other.
Many of these of these lazy ‘opiners’ are
also the same folks who faulted President Obama for not responding more
aggressively to Governor Romney in the first debate, and would be the first
to say someone was lackluster if they did not fire back at a challenge. Folks
complain that debaters aren’t civil, then complain that debaters are not
being aggressive enough, don’t have enough ‘emotion.’ But, civility is the control of emotion. The reality is most folks will rate an
aggressive performance higher than a controlled one, and will think an
emotional debate (with drama) better than a polite one with facts. The public
made quite clear that it did not value professorial and civil restraint in
the first debate. Obama got the memo,
and both men came into the second contest knowing this. The surprise was not that the two were
willing to get into each other’s ‘space.’
It was that the town hall medium did not mollify the impulse as much
as expected. Then again, remember Al
Gore doing the same thing to George Bush in the 2000 town hall-style
debate? The truth is that once someone
aggressively challenges you, you only have two ugly choices: be perceived as
aggressive and ‘not likable,’ or as a doormat and even less likable. This especially true if you are a man,
feminism notwithstanding. Years ago, when I was a
strapping young man working as a grocery clerk at a Safeway supermarket while
I attended college, I often worked in the back stock room. I was even then a stickler for rules and
formal civility. One day, while a
group of young male stockers (it was all guys then) briefly gathered in the
back as we sometimes would, one of the other stockers, a wilder and more
free-wheeling kind of guy, decided to jump me. We were both on the clock, dressed in our
long pants, dark ties, and long aprons for work, in the middle of tall stacks
of all kinds of merchandise. As I
struggled to get him off of me, I was carefully trying not to damage any of
the merchandise around, and was extremely concerned that a manager would walk
in and find us in horseplay. He would
not give, and was laughing and just having a wonderful time. I kept swinging my body trying to free
myself from his grip, but the guy was just not letting go, even as our wild
loops started getting ever closer to the precariously piled groceries all
around us. The other boys were just
edging us on, watching the spectacle to see what would happen next. It finally dawned on me that this monkeyman did not give a rat’s ass (pardon the French)
what happened to the property around us, or who else might come upon this
melee. Only then I realized I had two
choices: either accept passive humiliation in front
of the other guys in my effort to preserve civility and propriety, or risk
damage to someone else’s property along with management disapproval or
disciplinary action. I chose the
latter. I swung my body around and
with full force lunged both of us backwards into a mini-skyscraper of plastic
bottle Coca-Colas. Monkeyman
took the brunt of the crash, and collapsed into a cascade of 32 oz. soda
bottles. He was still laughing as I
looked down on the heap that was now him and the leaking cokes. What a clown. I was really ticked, but I hid it. Sometimes, nobody will really
care that you were civil and proper (no matter what they say). All they will really care about is whether
you won or lost. Sometimes, the moral course is
to lose. Sometimes it is not. UWFR Forecast for Mideast Police Action
Gains Traction We notified our readers in our
September 13 UWF&R brief that a police action by the administration would
be provoked by the recent events in the Middle East. We now see the first reports of just such
an action in serious consideration (read Associated
Press report). UWFR - balanced, educated, and
with a proven, solid record of accurate forecasts.
Comments may be
directed to contactproject@ultrapolisproject.com,
or if you receive the newsletter email, also via a reply to the email address
from which you receive it. |
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Main Index of the Ultrapolis World Forecast & Review © Copyright 2012, The
Ultrapolis Project – All Rights Reserved.
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