Town Hall Debate

Live-blogging the VP debate was a first for me. It is something the pros do quite often and I thought I would try to emulate them and possibly disguise myself as a pro blogger. Anyway, as you can see below, there was no live-blogging for the presidential debate the other night. I was busy that night, but I did record the debate on my sleek VCR and finished watching it last night.

I quickly get bored when the debaters dive into Washingtonian and their round about way of speaking far beyond the time limit, but not really answering the questions. There was a lot of that Tuesday night from both candidates. This seemed to be the pattern of the debate. The question is asked. McCain speaks first, offering one to three sentences throughout his speech that sort of answer the question. Obama gets a chance to respond, also offering one to three sentences, and then getting interrupted by Brokaw because he is talking too long. Might I add, Brokaw's persistent mentioning of the answer time limits did get a little annoying. I say, let the candidates answer the question and hack it out for a healthy amount of time. What is two minutes?

Anyway, in a debate like this, where questions aren't really being answered, the candidates use the question as a catalyst to launch them into some aspect of their platform. There is a lot to judge, but I am not necessarily judging a candidate's answer, but what they spend their time talking about. With that said, I thought Obama spoke eloquently about where he wants to lead America and how he will lead America. McCain did this as well, but since McCain maintains that he and his running mate are the ticket for the average American, then he needs to be able to relate to them in a debate like this and he didn't. This is somewhat ironic because all afternoon the news networks touted his skills in town-hall style debates, but McCain seemed uneasy in this format with Obama. He was nervously wandering around the stage, barely making eye contact with Obama and referring to Obama as "that one" during one point in the debate (I don't believe McCain's use of "that one" was at all a racially charged comment, as some have suggested, but it was definitely a poor choice of words).

One thing that I love about the way the Obama campaign operates is their relatively clean campaign strategy. I was disappointed earlier this week when the campaign rolled out a criticism against McCain for his role in the Keating Five. Although that is an important part of McCain's political career, discussion of that old scandal is not going to move the country forward. Anyway, since McCain has been going with spectacularly dirty attacks for about a week now I think those attacks reserved Obama the right to bring up McCain's "Bomb, bomb, Iran" and "Next up, Baghdad" quotes in the middle of the debate. Admittedly, I was laughing out loud when Obama did this because that is a funny attack, but also because it is entertaining to hear attacks like that from Obama because truly, it seems to go against his character.

Many questions posed to the candidates dealt with the country's biggest struggles: the economic crisis, the war in Iraq, successfully capturing/killing Osama Bin Laden, Social Security and health care reform. And throughout the whole debate, McCain was saying he had the solutions to all these crises. He wouldn't necessarily explain how he would solve them, but would just offer something up like this on finding Bin Laden:

"I'll get Osama bin Laden, my friends. I'll get him. I know how to get him. I'll get him no matter what and I know how to do it."

I know McCain cares about solving these issues, but since he has all these magical solutions to the country's biggest problems he should share them with the current president. What the hell are you waiting for McCain?

The Daily Show also picked up on this last night in their debate analysis. I post the whole video because it is all great, but they touch upon the all-knowing McCain at the very end.