The Debate part two

OK, now that I got the official bit out of the way, some impressions.

I liked the debate format, it's the closest thing we've had to an honest debate in years. Both candidates are to be applauded for agreeing to a give-and-take format that allowed them to pose questions to each other, and also for not abusing that overmuch by interrupting each other.

I thought it was telling, I'm just not sure of what, that McCain (who asked for this style of meeting when he asked for a series of "town meeting" campaign events) almost never looked directly at Senator Obama, and referred to him in the third person, as though he were not in the room. When McCain was speaking, it was "Senator Obama wants this" or "My opponent wants that".

Obama on the other hand stayed truer to the proposed format, speaking TO Senator McCain. "John, you know that's not true", "John, you said (x) and you were wrong", and he looked at McCain when he was speaking to/about him.

To me, that looked more Presidential. McCain tried to sow seeds of doubt about Obama's abilities by repeating some version of the phrase "Senator Obama doesn't get it" over and over, but Obama looked more comfortable. He looked prepared to take challengers head on, while McCain looked like he'd rather have applied that "don't talk to them until they already agree with you" tactic on Obama.

McCain also seemed to rely on his stump speech line and his carefully packaged image far more than Obama. I got home a little bit late, and the first thing I heard when I turned it on was McCain using his stump speech laugh line about how he wasn't sure if the money to study the DNA of bears was a paternity or criminal matter, and he used the "I was never voted Miss Congeniality" line multiple times. He also brought up his war bona fides several times, while conveniently ignoring the facts that:

A) there is no evidence that he's any better a tactician or strategist than anyone else (he's only been directly involved in one war, we "lost" that one and he spent most of his time during it in a cell), and

B) there is still a lot of unanswered evidence that "war hero" McCain may actually have actively worked to cover up things that happened during his POW years, to the detriment of other POW/MIAs of that era, and

C) veterans groups continue to rate him very low, so while he claims he's the one who will support our vets the most, it doesn't seem they feel his history on the topic has been much to crow over.


I plan to re-watch the debate sometime this weekend, and I'll probably cover some more things as they come into my head, but I wanted to get these out there, while I was thinking about them.

Liam.