Uhh...where was the debate?

The BBQ Pit
21

Agree with both of these complaints. Especially the travel bit–mostly when McCain tried to make it sound like Obama was both lazy and incompetent for not bothering to go to Iraq or Afghanistan and check it out in person.

Also didn’t like McCain’s focus on Earmarks and Obama’s history with earmarks.

I wasn’t sure that Obama gave me a lot of reason to like him, but McCain gave me several reasons to dislike his planned policies. On the other hand, . . .I’ll admit to being strongly Anti-Bush, which translates into Anti-McCain. My companions last night who will probably vote for McCain found Obama’s planned economic policies to be scary strategies.

22

McCain made a good showing. Good in the sense that it probably worked for the people who voted for Bush. The thing that I dislike is his simplifying our very complex world. “Akmadinajad is a boogie man and therefor shouldn’t be talked to”, “We can win in Iraq”, etc. His experience hasn’t convinced he could make the best choices.

As someone who has long admired McCain, I find myself really disliking who he is becoming. Regarding this debate I found his refusal to make eye contact with Obama, his constant laughing away Obama’s remarks and his blink rate to be off-putting.

I think McCain is intelligent. Intelligent but clearly not informed.

Face it, McCain needed to knock this one out of the park - he didn’t do it. Obama held his own here. From that standpoint I feel ‘won’ this debate.

23

Here’s something that occured to me tonight: We make a bigger deal out of the damned Super Bowl, than we do the Presidential debates. This strikes me as pretty fargin’ stupid. We shouldn’t have an eight hour pre-game show for the Super Bowl ([Lewis Black] Who’s watching that? There’s not enough liquor in the universe to be able to watch that! [/LB]), and not a “pre-game” show for the debates. Given that the biggest thing to come out of the Super Bowl is the SCOTUS decision that you can flash your titty to a billion or so people, I’d think that we’d be dedicating a bit more of our coverage to the debates than the Super Bowl.

I also think that we should have a standardized format for the debates, and not this bickering over how they should be structured. It should be there’s a slate of questions (say 10), and the candidates get a random selection of half of them to study for before the debates.

The debate itself should be ran something like a game show. You’ve got a moderator/time keeper who asks the questions (and hits a loud buzzer the moment a candidate goes over their alloted time), a score keeper (more on this in a moment) and a pair of judges. Who goes first will be decided by a coin toss, and when a candidate is asked a question, he/she will have two minutes to respond, the opposing candidate will have one minute to rebutt/ask a follow up, and then the first candidate will have another two minutes to react to that. The judges will award/subtract points based on the accuracy of a candidates answer or if a candidate goes over their allotted time. If Candidate A says something like his/her opponent authored a bill which would require all Americans to have a barcode tattooed on the back of their neck, and Candidate B’s bill really prohibited the use of tattoos as a means of identifying prisoners, not only would the judges penalize Candidate A, but they’d have a link up where you could read the actual bill. (You could do a bit of a split screen thing as well, for the viewing audience to see it.)

This would do a number of things (and have the judges be selected from a respected non-partisan group). One is that it would shut down a lot of bald faced lying which goes on during the debates. The other is that it would give a more balanced perspective on the debates. We all know that both sides have their “own” “news” networks, which many of the party loyal listen to/watch exclusively. This means that while they’ll hear all about the other jerk’s mistakes/misstatements/etc., they’ll hear almost nothing about their own guys screw ups. By having judges who call out “foul” during the debates when one side or the other tries to spin their bullshit, both sides get to hear what a wanker their candidate is.

The scoring would provide a “neutral” assessment of how each candidate did during the debate, while providing ample fodder for water cooler discussion the following day. (Can you believe the judges fouling out Candidate B because he/she said _________? It was a simple goof! Anyone could make that mistake! That was totally wrong, and completely obscured his point about ________.) It would also make things more interesting to watch, as well as put a little added pressure on the candidates. (I imagine that a candidate who got totally flustered and started bitching about the judges/time keeper/etc. would see a dramatic drop in their poll ratings, as would one who kept lying about what they or their opponent had done.)

Candidates could also call for a ruling on something that the other candidate said, so that if the comment was “technically” accurate, but unjustly portrayed them in a bad light, they could have a “neutral” observer weigh in on the matter.

24

You now have your choice of either the ‘smirky-patronizing smile’ or the ‘clenched-jaw eye bulge’ while you stare at your podium during Obama’s response.

25

OK, you’re back on my Christmas card list with that one.

26

I think most of you have a different expectation out of a debate than I do. I expect the candidates to question each other and address EACH OTHER after the leading question has been proposed. I don’t have any interest in listening to the debatees talk to the moderator or the camera. That is what speeches are for.

In their retorts to each other I expect to hear alot of "you"s instead of “Senator BLAH” as though they are not standing 10 feet from each other. They look like big scared pussies when they do that. I don’t want to hear them go back and forth “clarifying” and restating the same positions over and over. I don’t want to have every single question return to “we have to fix our economy/spending is out of control/health care reform etc…”. Thanks for the enlightenment guys on what WE need to do. MY 7 year old knows that. I want to know what YOU are going to do.

A great example of these candidates inability to answer simple questions is when they were asked how the $700B bailout would change their plans as president because they would HAVE to change with that large of a $$ dump. Neither would answer the question no matter how many times Leher tried to force them so he gave up since they were only using the forum to present portions of canned speeches/answers that didn’t fit the question asked.

So no, the debate wasn’t much of a debate to me.

27

That’s not a debate, that’s an argument. And it very quickly leads to people talking over one another, shouting each other down, and then no one is better understood at the end than at the beginning. At that did happen a few times, especially at the end of the debate.

For years, the debates have been very formalized and stiff, with very strict time limits on each statement and response, much like a college forensics team debate. That’s given us all the idea that “presidential” means referring to people in the third person with honorifics and addressing people directly and forthrightly means “hotheaded” and “out-of-control”. I give props to the moderator last night for at least *attempting *to bring a bit of direct interaction to the proceedings, but both candidates were well schooled in the formalized, uh, form of debate, and that’s what they stuck with.

Now that, I agree with. Nothing to do with debate vs argument, and all to do with not wanting to see headlines tomorrow about being flipfloppers or breaking promises or lying to the people. Obama did admit that some things that we “need” will have to be delayed, but he wouldn’t get specific about which programs in particular he was going to choose to put off. I was frustrated by that too. McCain just dodged the question entirely, and that was frustrating and infuriating.

28

This is actually quite funny.

29

To me, watching the debate was a way to see the two candidates head to head, talking about the same issues. Were both candidates guilty of giving canned speeches which were less than responsive to the issue at hand? Yes. But I think it is unrealistic to expect anything more interactive. In this day of instant video around the world, to expect the candidates to come off-book to any meaningful extent is unrealistic.

ETA: I’ll grant you that it wasn’t much of a Debate, but I’m not sure I want an unscripted argument either. More interaction good, fighting not so good.

30

See, I disagree here. I think there is a middle ground between what we saw last night and an argument. The moderator is there to make sure they don’t talk over each other and have equal time. They might has well have been on different channels on different nights being interviewed for 90% of the night because they were not reactive to each other in any way other than to “clarify” what the opposition said. I think that 2 adult men, particularly presidential candidates, should be able to tactfully debate and DISCUSS the issues at hand and question each other on the spot without coming across argumentitive for the sake of being difficult.

I stand by what I said and my view of the “debate”.

I’m looking forward to Palin/Biden. That will be funny to watch.

31

No chance. He was GLANCING in McCain’s direction for incredibley short periods. At no point during the debate did I see either one of them look the other in the eye while speaking. McCain didn’t even do the glancing that Obama was doing.

32

I agree with you. John McCain is coming off as quite the crotchety old man, and I dislike him for it. Obama came off much better IMO.

33

How can you look someone in the eye if they aren’t looking at you?

34

lol what did you expect Obama to do? run in front of McCain’s podium so he could make eye contact? Grab his face and force him to look?

Obama clearly looked at McCain throughout the debate, and addressed him by his first name, but never once did I see McCain look at Obama or address him as Barack. In fact, I don’t recall McCain ever addressing Obama directly at all.

35

I found Obama to be way too polite ( I was a bit afraid of that). I just hope this ‘politeness’ doesn’t cost him the presidency. He was obviously threading water vis a vis the reputed resident Foreign Policy Expert, and that might explain part of it. I was just hoping for a little more oomph from him.

Maybe during the next debate (on the economy) Obama could serve McCain some of the ‘What he doesn’t understand’‘What he doesn’t get’ that McCain peppered him with (time… and time… and time… and time again – for dramatic effect, no doubt) last night.

Incidentally, is it just me or did anyone else find the Audience Reaction Meter at the bottom of the screen to be next to totally useless?
And yes, I DO agree with those who stated that Obama DID look squarely at McCain a number of times, with NO reciprocity from the other side. Shyness?:rolleyes:

36

Not that any of this matters a whole lot to this discussion, but Obama was directly and forthrightly looking at McCain during quite a lot of the debate. It didn’t start that way, but at the beginning of the debate, Mr. Lehrer kept picking at them to address each other, and Obama quickly did “get it”, and McCain did not.

As has been noted by jsgoddess and Snowboarder Bo, you can’t look at someone “in the eyes” if they are not willing to look back. Obama certainly was looking at McCain, and McCain was avoiding Obama. It made McCain look weak. It made McCain look patronizing, mean and smarmy. Of course, I believe that McCain really is weak, patronizing, mean and smarmy…

37

Obama did make more of an effort than McCain but that doesn’t change the fact that this wasn’t a debate in the true sense of the word. That’s my main point.

38

I agree with you on this, but Mr. Lehrer’s insistence that the candidates speak to each other made the thing a bit more interesting.

I watch these not to hear what the candidates have to say so much - it’s usually just a rehash of things that they’ve said already - but more to hear how they say it. In short, I was more interested in the demeanor of each candidate.

Plus, I was hoping that McCain would say something really stupid or lose his temper and meltdown in front of millions of viewers…

39

The only spark of life I saw from McCain was when he went on about Kissinger but that was only fleeting. I liked when he said (paraphrasing poorly from memory) “If you need to bomb someone then you just do it you don’t say it out loud as the president of the USA. You just don’t say that” when he was talking about what Obama said about Pakistan.

40

I liked that too but then Obama made a really good point when he said you don’t say bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran, either.