The Debate

I know a couple of people have been waiting to hear my take on the debate last night, so I guess it's time I sat down to write something.

The truth is, I didn't write before this on the topic because I'm not sure there was a clear winner. Of course, there's all the old wisdom about how "a tie goes to the current leader", or the argument that "The topic this time was McCain's professed strong suit, so for Obama to hold his own makes it a win for him", but that all seems like spin to me.

In my opinion, someone watching the debates who hasn't paid all that much attention up until now and isn't terribly well versed in the facts of the world, it was pretty even. They both had their "um, ah" moments, McCain perhaps came across as a bit more snarky and condescending, but neither one either hit the ball out of the park, nor tripped over their own feet.

There are several sites I like to go to for "truth tests". My favorite (for political things) is factcheck.org, and of course for everything else my favorite is snopes.com.

But up there on my list is politifact.com. I like them a tad less, because they rate every statement on a "Truth-o-meter", ranking everything as "True, mostly true, half true, barely true or pants on fire", which loses some nuance.

That said, their writeup on the statements in the debate can be found here.

Some of the instances where nuance changes the meaning are the "half true" when talking about whether Henry Kissinger's statement was more in line with Obama's position or McCain's. I've heard Obama talk about "meetings without preconditions" many times, and I've always gotten the sense that he was not necessarily talking about Presidential level meetings, but Administration meetings. When he said "I would not require preconditions before meeting with other nations" I've always taken that as the conceit that the man is the office and the office is the entire administration.

Because my impression of the Bush Administration policy for most of the last 8 years has been "We will not talk with Iran until they give up their nuclear ambitions", meaning "No one in my administration will have any official contact with anyone in their government until they accede to our wishes in the negotiations". And so to me, Obama's reaction has been "That's ludicrous, that's what negotiation is all about, of course I wouldn't deny talks with other nations until they'd given in to our demands."

So calling that "half true" buys into the McCain perpetuated impression that Obama is saying he'll personally, as President, meet with anyone and everyone.

But, and here's the kicker, I also dislike the "half true" for this reason: Even if you buy into the idea that Obama is claiming he would personally meet with any world leader without preconditions and McCain is holding firm to the Bush policy of no official negotiations until they meet our preconditions, then to me Kissinger's statement is still much closer to the Obama position than the McCain position.

All in all, though, I believe that for those who don't pay attention to the news, McCain and Obama more or less tied. I believe for those who DO pay attention, there was a lot more falsehood and unfair innuendo on the McCain side than on the Obama side.

Liam.