This is a lawyer trick. You do it when the other side is scoring points so as not to betray your emotions. Theoretically makes you look calm under fire. Especially useful for a guy like McCain, who has an animated face.
I believe it was a list of younger (and given McCain’s age, younger is a more flexible term) chubby chicks with an affinity for tobacco products and executive power…
Yeah, but he was doing it right out of the gate, before the debate had even started! (Maybe he figured he was already losing by that point…)
This is pretty much my guess too. When I was in high school and had to memorize a bunch of formulas for something like a physics or math test, I’d regurgitate them up on my scrap paper as soon as I got the test booklet. Then I didn’t have to worry about remembering them anymore. So he might have been jotting down whatever stats he was going to be using.
I think he was just taking quick notes of topics Obama mentioned so he’d be better prepared to answer back to him, rather than relying on his memory, or just using canned responses, on account of those didn’t work so well for Sarah the week before.