Saturday, September 27, 2008

Last Night's Debate



The pundits seemed fairly evenly divided over who they felt was the winner last night, with a little bit more saying McCain. The one thing that they all seemed to agree on was that it was not a slam dunk for either one, no K.O. blow, probably no big surge in momentum.


McCain's early theme's were cutting waste and keeping the goverment and others accountable, while Obama kept trying to tie McCain and Pres. Bush together.


Obama seemed a little frustrated much of the time from his facial expressions and his interuptions of McCain to say things like: "That's not true".


As was pointed out several time, Obama said at least eight times something to the effect of "I agree with John", while McCain many times pointed out that Obama just didn't understand issues.


I was frustrated because neither one of the candidates were very good about answering the question or giving specifics, instead trying to turn almost every question into something else that is one of their strengths, or thei opponents weaknesses.


There was a lack of memorable lines, but one of my favorites was when Obama was waffling about meeting hostile dictators such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran:


Obama: " ...And the notion that we would sit with Ahmadinejad and not say anything while he's spewing his nonsense and his vile comments is ridiculous. Nobody is even talking about that."


McCain: "So let me get this right. We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, "We're going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth," and we say, "No, you're not"? Oh, please."

I thought that McCain won the debate overall, though some polls say Obama did, and McCain did not get the big victory he probably needed, as he is behind in the polls, and foreign policy is one of his strong suits. All things considered, I would have to say the Obama camp is probably fine with the outcome, since he did not get crushed or make a major gaffe.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The debates where a huge disappointment for the American people. Working men and women looked for a candidate that could break from their formulaic message of "change" or "experience" to get real answers on one figure; $700 billion. Thats our money, what are you going to do with it and how will you alter your course?

"Stay on message John, you have experience" "Just link him to Bush Obama".

Sure they don't have time to digest what this massive injection of our money means to their stump items, who can contemplate $1 billion, let alone the $700 billion bail-out?

As our politicians alter the definition of captilism, we need to redifine our involvement in democracy.

Unknown said...

Another thing: Without Randy, Paula, and Simon there to help us with the evaluation; debate viewers use tremendous bias to create the "winner". Try performing this brief survey:

Q1: Who won the debate?
Q2: Who were you voting for before the debate?
Q3: Who are you voting for after watching the debate?

The answers should be remarkably similar. The lack of deliverance in this debate makes me part of the few, the proud, the undecided.