FG leader's performance connected with the uncommitted viewer, writes Terry Prone.
The media approaches the big debate like a farmer setting out to buy a sheep at a cattle mart. It looks for precisely the "strengths", which in television terms are weaknesses. It rates the participants on their data output, ignoring the fact that television stinks when it comes to delivering data.
What television is good at is delivering excitement, emotional connectedness, impressions and the confirmation of pre-existing prejudices. Radio shifts attitudes and behaviours. Television does not.
So the nerdy rating of either of the participants on how many statistics he delivered about the economy or health spend, while generative of interesting discussion immediately after such a debate, is to start from where uncommitted viewers decidedly do not start.
Uncommitted viewers - or floating voters - do not start, notepad on lap, ready to mark one contender against another on each thematic section of the debate, as the media does.
The last two Fine Gael leaders to debate with Bertie Ahern were seen by media analysts to have won. They did. On data. Each garnered top marks on their mastery of what TV viewers are least interested in. The majority of the viewers, however, preferred Bertie Ahern, making an emotional connection with a man they could identify with.
He seemed more like them than the top-of-the-class-kiss-the-teacher Fine Gael leaders.
This time, that great personal strength of the Taoiseach got lost in preparation. This time, someone on the Fianna Fáil side decided that the way to go was the Brian Cowen route.
Drown them in data. Take over Miriam O'Callaghan's questioning role. Demonstrate mastery of everything. Aggressively establish the point made by Dick Roche earlier in the day: Enda Kenny's a nice guy, but the pubs of Ireland are full of nice guys you wouldn't trust to run the country.
Ahern delivered on that brief superbly. He unequivocally won on the amount of data transmitted. He proved he can do a credible version of Brian Cowen. And, in the process, he became less than the best of himself.
Notably absent from this debate was the Bertie every focus group indicates we would all like to have a pint with (assuming we're pint-drinkers). The warm, approachable personality erring (wisely) on the side of dithery self-deprecation was left outside the studio.
The point at which this pattern established itself was where Enda Kenny talked about machinery in Beaumont Hospital that was 30 years out of date. Ahern snapped that since the hospital was only 20 years old, it wasn't likely that they'd have 30-year-old equipment. Which demonstrated Ahern's unequalled capacity to listen and concentrate, while moving him inexorably towards a "you're only a waffler" argumentativeness, which never plays well for him on television. His very annoyance promoted Kenny into precisely the position Fianna Fáil should not have wanted him to own: serious contendership.
Enda Kenny's challenge from the outset was at once harder and easier than that facing the Taoiseach. It was harder because TV viewers prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar, and Kenny is markedly less familiar to them than Ahern. It was harder because he has only a fraction of Ahern's Cabinet experience. It was harder because he has never been known as a master of policy detail.
Pre-debate, the view was that if, at the end of the 80 minutes, he was still standing and reasonably gaffe-free, it would be an achievement.
That expectation had changed within minutes of the beginning of the programme because of the opening statements to camera. Ahern's eyeline was wrong, so that he gave the impression of addressing viewers' navels, and his script was a podium speech rather than a talk-to-camera. He got through - but made nothing of - sentences like "all this came not by chance, but by choice". And he did not seem sure where his hands should be.
Kenny, on the other hand, brought a stillness and unexpected assuredness to his opening statement which allowed him to deliver meaning rather than words. The doubt at the back of the viewer's mind ("Would this man embarrass us on the international stage?") was scotched with style at the beginning and at the end of the programme. Particularly at the end, where Kenny took ownership of the discourse and forced Ahern into a relatively weak response.
What was significant about Kenny's performance was that he did not simply deliver - as had been expected - learned-off, focus group-tested scripts and then flounder in interaction with Ahern. What emerged was a man who knew his stuff and was out there, prepared to mix it with this country's most media-experienced taoiseach.
He could have done without the trailing wire left for him by his own colleague, who had failed to bring key information to a press conference earlier in the week. He made a dog's dinner of the word "profligacy", just as Ahern made mush of the word "specific". He was, at times, floored by being interrogated by two people rather than facilitated by one to interrogate the other.
However, he made a key decision, early on (or perhaps in advance of the debate) to go for short, emotionally-freighted inputs the viewers could imagine: sick people sitting for hours on plastic chairs; a man waiting for months for a wheelchair; and an individual in mental health crisis reading a sign on the door of a psychiatric services provider saying: "Sorry, we're closed."
The end result was a performance strong on emotional intelligence and capacity to connect with the uncommitted viewer.
What is puzzling is why Ahern, who owns that territory, was persuaded to cede it and to major instead on punitive point-scoring.
Terry Prone works for Carr Communications and is a media analyst and novelist.