For these and other opinions, please tune to this thread over in The Pit.
Similar thread, just has the F-word in the title.
The trouble with the debates is that each candidate says essentially the same thing, over and over, to wit: “I am one-hundred percent correct about everything and my opponent, who, by the way, worships the devil when he is not drowning puppies, is one-hundred percent wrong about everything.”
Give me Ralph Nader. Or the baseball playoffs.
Damn you vanilla, you stole my “…and please stop calling me Shirley.” line.
I tuned in desperately hoping for some real fuck ups, there were none. Gore trampled Bush on the issues and basically knew what he was talking about. Bush sounded like me in college after blowing off a speech and getting drunk, trying to wing it. Bush just couldn’t seem to concentrate for 90 minutes, and seemed to think if he talked really slow and used really small words he could stretch his 15 minutes of material.
Bush probably accidentally helped himself by being so unprepared because Gore realized he had no one to debate against, and nothing to refute so he got cocky. That hurt him.
Did anyone else think the two called each other before the debate and coordinated wardrobes?
Hee hee…I was about to say…Whose suit and tie did everyone like better?
Why doesn’t Bush nail Gore on all those stupid stories that his spin doctors have been making up? Like the old lady in Iowa who has to pick up bottles and cans to pay for her prescription drugs (then drives her Winnebago camper to Boston). Or the one about Gore’s mother in law-who has to buy a drug that costs 3X the cost of the canine equivilent,.
This is low grade moron stuff-I’m insulted that Gore thinks we are dumb enough to fall for this crap!
Probably for the same reason that Gore didn’t nail Bush on his stupid “I found one family in America that benefits more from my tax cut plan than yours” schtick.
Personally, any time I hear one of those “let me tell you about Citizen X” stories, it just makes me think that, if politicians are resorting to special cases to ilustrate the benefits of their plan, then the benefits for the rest of us are questionable.
Al Gore doing what Al Gore does.
Yup. She also drove out only because she does not like flying. And if she was poor, she could never afford all that gas for the trip…
He also brought up his support for the gulf war, when he voted with Republicans, etc. Turns out he only argeed to vote this way after demanding (and getting) a certain amount of TV time during prime time to say whateven he wanted to say (remember he was preparing to run for president in '91) in exchange for the vote. Yup, sent troops to combat for some TV time, good old Al.
Bush really stumbled a few times, and really failed to rebut a few direct attacts - that ‘1%’ from Gore was repeated three or four times, and Bush did not directly answer. He talked in general about his tax plan, but just could not address the pint directly. He also just stopped talking a couple of times, as if to gather his thoughts (not a bad thing overall, but in a debate, hmmm.)
What if the other candidates where there? These two would have been destroyed.
Bush certainly has been in his share of debates. Two campaigns for governor, the Presidential primaries, and now this. This is a man who has spent many many hours on TV, in front of crowds, giving speeches, and answering questions. I certainly didn’t sense any fear or immenent tears. I’m not sure where this impression comes from that Bush is new to all this.
These two nincompoops were helped tremendously by the fact it was only the two of them. I kept watching and laughing, it was the funniest thing I’ve seen on TV in months.
Anybody else catch it when Bush was talking about a school in Houston and “at-risk” kids, he said “basically that means they can’t learn”. LOL!!
My favorite lame-ass soundbite attempt was the “mediscare” - which made no sense and sounded ridiculous. He was also getting annoying with the “scare you in the voting booth” line. I hate the scriptedness and repetitiveness of both of them.
And if you are sick of politcal ads, move to California. You’d hardly know we were having an election if you didn’t watch the news. I haven’t seen ONE…for anyone, not just presidential candidates. Oh, I take that back. I’ve seen a couple of Nader commercials.
stoid
And did you understand Bush’s line about “The military exists to fight and win wars, and therefore preventing any wars from happening”? Cuz I didn’t.
Stoidela- that line made perfect sense to me; it’s the standard “If we have a strong military which is capable of winning any war with little effort, no other country will be willing to start a war against us, or to start a war where it’s likely we get involved.”
I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who though Gore was acting like a grade-A asshole with the sighs and the rolling of eyes and the other petulant stuff. My main complaint about Bush was he didn’t walk over and slap Gore upside the head. That would have ensured my vote for Bush. (As it is, I just have to settle for the fact that I like Bush’s Social Security plan and that Al Gore seems destined to piss me off every time I hear him talk about an issue.)
For someone who was supposed to moderate the discussion, I thought Jim Leher did a poor job of keeping control of the entire affair.
Plus, I wasn’t that impressed with the overall questions, either. In the opening of the debate, he made it sound like the questions were so exclusive, no one could possibly figure out what he was going to ask. “I alone have selected the questions, blah blah blah”. Then he asked all the stuff that we hear about all the time anyway. Remember the rape question that Bernard Shaw asked Michael Dukakis in 1988? What about some shockers like that?
Both candidates pretty much talked about whatever they wanted no matter what the question was, anyway. It would have been more interesting if Leher would have interrupted a couple times, or called Gore on his head shaking, etc.
I heard somewhere that AL did not know that the camera was on him during times where Bush was speaking. (I was watching C-Span where they kep the camera on both people all the time. I just thought it was bad form for both of them to react so visibly to each other. of couse he knew the mic was on so there wasn’t any excuse for the sigh.
I thought Bush was amazingly underprepared. He didn’t try to refute or explain the numbers in his budge when Gore hammered him on that. Bush couldn’t have not known that Gore was going to do that that night. Gore’s only been doing it for about every day this campaign season. That cute trick was directing people to Bush’s site to get the numbers that Bush didn’t know for himself.
I think Gore had that pancake makeup on because he has that Nixonian tendancy to sweat. They said they also chilled the room to about 65 degrees. And I wouldn’t rule out the campaigns haggling over wardrobe.
I thought it was wise for Gore not to attack back when Bush reintroduced the “Buddas Temple”.
I laughed my ass off when I read Milossarian’s comments about Gore’s makeup. Put him in frilly lingerie, and Gore would have been great as the sweet transvestite.
I was also turned immediately off when Jim Lehrer asked the first question (about Bush’s lack of experience) and Gore did the stereotypical politician thing by ignoring the question and spewing off bullshit. “First, Jim, I’d like to thank my lovely wife for being here.” Then he went into what was obviously a well-rehearsed canned speech. Blah Blah Blah. Cut the bullshit and ANSWER THE QUESTION.
I also thought Gore was disrespectful by constantly ignoring the rules and taking more time than he was allotted.
Bush would have used more time had he been able to think of something intelligent to say.
And, for the love of God, if either of them conjured up one more maudlin “Dick Jones from Minneapolis, who’s in the audience” (picture candidate waving gleefully to his “new best friend”) story, I was gonna hurl.
All in all, it was more fun than a barrel full of monkeys. Oh wait, it WAS a barrel full of monkeys.
Thank God, someone who likes Bush! I was beginning to think I was the only pro-Bush member of the MB! I think what’s gonna earn Bush alot of the votes is the fact that he’s very pro-military, and realizes it needs to be improved. I’ll admit it, our military is going down the shit hole, and we can thank the Clinton administration for that. I’m telling you, if Gore is elected president, I will do everything within my power to get out of the army. Well, maybe not, but I really dont’ want to be in an army controlled by that man.
Why I’m picking bush (maybe I should go to Great Debates? naw, too lazy): his focus is the military. even if I hadnt’ joined the army, I would still vote for bush for that single reason. gore claims his focus is education, but I’m a bit suspicous of his motives; as I’m sure you all are aware, education is a prime way to win voters. His main problem w/ education now? over crowding. so, we get more teachers, build more schools, both are dealt with on a state and local level. So, what else can Gore focus on? Bush is getting alot of crap for not being straight with what he’s gonna do, but it’s not like gore is being open either.
Stoidela, you do realize that now we’re going to be inundated by messages from Pennsylvania, Michigan,etc. Dopers screaming “Get down on your knees and thank the IPU that you’re not being barraged with all these goddamn ads!” I’m in Massachusetts and that debate in Boston was the first time we’ve seen these guys in ages.
My roommate and I MST3K’ed the whole thing. We ended reciting “The richest one percent of Americans” with Prince Albert and booing, and “Mediscare” is gonna be really useful. I had a friend who said that he thought that Bush did well when he had a point to make but throw a curve ball at him and he became a stammering moron. I thought I smelled fear from him but maybe I was wrong. But Al’s exasperated sighs got real old real fast. You could HEAR him rolling his eyes. And my roommate turned to me and said quietly, “Ya know, Winnebago’s ain’t that cheap” which kind of deflated all those anecdotes. I felt so sorry for that poor girl in Florida who had to stand in class…hell, I had fifty people in my homeroom in NYC in the Seventies and President Ford told the city to “drop dead” (or something like that).
Of course, we still have three more of these things to savor–I’m really looking forward to Dick n’ Joe tomorrow. I’m just glad my VCR worked and recorded “Angel” for me. BTW, my cable system has, at 9:00 Tuesdays, “Angel” on Channel 6, “Dark Angel” on Channel 9, and “Touched by an Angel” on Channel 21. Sheesh.
Carolyn
PBS didn’t use the split screen, so I didn’t notice Gore’s sighs and eye rolling but his audible snorts of derision were hilarious. And Bush still looks and sounds like he was whacked in the head with a two-by-four.
I wish that Buchanan and Nader could have been there. Then the two hours (believe it or not, it was just two hours!) would have not been so tedious. Alan Keyes adds something to a debate, too. I don’t agree with them about much, but they know how to present and support an argument.
Don’t Bush and Gore have anything real to say? Has the culture of sound bites taken over so much that they don’t even have more than five minutes of phoney stuff? They just kept saying the same crap over and over!
YES!!! When he said that, I looked at my girlfriend and we both burst out laughing. This guy truly is an idiot. Ask any 15 year old, and they can probably give you a pretty accurate definition of what at-risk means when referring to children, yet he uses it as an example and he doesn’t even know what it means! What a freak. There were plenty of times I noticed him saying incoherent statements, but that one took the cake.
Jman
His “at-risk” definition really threw me, too.
Upon reflection, and placing it in the context of what he was saying, I think what he meant was, he opposed unfortunate labels such as “at-risk” because it means euphemistically that those placing the labels think these kids can’t learn.
Think about it. Before the comment, he was saying that “at-risk” was an unfortunate label. After the comment, he was saying how this “Teachers for Kids” group or whatever the hell they were proved that premise wrong.
Now, if you want to argue that it’s pretty un-presidential to not be able to get your points out more articulately – particularly when you’ve drilled for something like your first presidential debate – I don’t know what to say to that …
Bush was rather mealy-mouthed on the RU486 question, but as a pro-choice Republican, I am understanding of that. I do not believe that Bush is really a strong Pro-Life candidate, whatever he feels he has to say to placate the far right in his party. I do not believe he would actively seek to overturn Roe v. Wade, and I think if he did, he would be in deep shit.
It’s unfortunate that he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions to stand up to that element of the party, but look what it did for my man McCain.