[QUOTE=E. Thorp]
Either Obama or Clinton could easily make mincemeat of McCain in debate, but so what? Gore and Kerry both made mincemeat of W. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
ETA: actually, IIRC Gore’s handlers instructed him to pull his punches in at least one debate. Kerry scored bullseye after bullseye, though, but it was never more important than windsurfing.
[/QUOTE]
Actually it’s not really true that Kerry beat President Bush in the debates–that was only true “as reported on the SDMB.” If you look at polling at the time all of the Kerry-Bush debates were basically a wash. The first one was Kerry’s only clear margin of victory in the polling, and none of them had a major impact on the election. I can’t remember the polling on the Gore-Bush debates, but I don’t remember them having much impact on the election either way.
Elections aren’t decided by debates in this country. There was a time when debates where much more important than they are now–but even then (thinking back to the Lincoln-Douglas debate era) they weren’t really all that decisive. Most people thought Lincoln held his own in those debates but he still lost the election.
But what really interests me is this thread itself. It’s the thread of someone who has been home googling stories about McCain to try and find something embarrassing, or someone who is, in fact, signed up to some sort of Obama-ite mailing list that sends out links about the opposition to disseminate throughout the internet. There’s no way this OP found this article “in good faith” by innocently perusing the net. This year old interview isn’t featured in any major news outlet right now, precisely because it is a year old.
This is the result of a partisan hack, a mindless fool who believes Obama is a representative of everything right and perfect and [Whoever Obama is running against] is a representative of *everything] wrong and evil. This is a stance that hasn’t wavered, whether Obama is being compared to John McCain or Hillary Clinton.
The truth of the matter is John McCain is a flawed man, he has said things which can be construed as dumb–he’s probably even said genuinely dumb things (I don’t think anything he said in the interview is dumb, just politically noncommital–the very fact that it has never become a big controversy in over a year’s time shows McCain came out of that interview pretty okay.)
I support McCain because across the spectrum of policy issues, his positions align closer to mine than either of the two remaining Democrat candidates.
I don’t think McCain is perfect, nor do I feel the need to spend my day googling up random articles or interviews about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in order to embarrass them with things they said years ago.
With Obama, I don’t need to google anything at all. I can just point out he’s a long time member of a racist organization–and I can say I don’t trust the man. I think he’s a black man with a sense of entitlement that hopes to “put one over on whitey” by getting elected to the Presidency where he will proceed to implement some of the most horrifying programs of wealth redistribution from white to black we’ve ever seen. I think most middle class Americans realize such programs are anathema to their well being and I hope they will vote against a racist like Obama.
But whatever Obama’s flaws, I’m not going to dredge stuff up about him. I’ll keep my comments on him relatively topical, and anything from his past that comes up will be things that have resurfaced in the media.
Unlike some posters who think of their candidate as some sort of religious messiah, I think of my candidate as a simple man. I don’t plan to sit at his feet or worship the ground he walks on. I don’t plan to say he is perfect because he isn’t.
But at the same time I’m not going to sit here and debate or argue with stuff that has clearly been datamined by a moronic Obamaite who has so many blinders on to Obama and so many delusional views about the other candidates I have to wonder if she suffers some sort of unhealthy obsession with the man.