(First Mac vs. O Debate) Up To The Judges

Every single pundit and political analyst in America today is spinning the result of yesterday’s debate towards his own personal ideological preference. Generally though, most do agree that John McCain did a lot better than Barack Obama, because he was able to continually (and effectively) get his main talking point through, “Mr. Obama doesn’t understand”, without appearing condescending or angry. McCain was able to constantly tell the audience that the problem with Obama was not his “bad faith” or lack of motivation, but simple naivete and inexperience.

Barack Obama, on his part, was simply unable to get his talking point through: McCain is Bush III. Although he began this approach early on, he had to relinquish it when McCain made the case that most Americans already ‘know him’ to be quite different than G.W. Bush on many issues, suddenly neutralizing the effectiveness of Obama’s claim, and also highlighting the fact that most Americans don’t know his counterpart.

Some networks have published countless post-debate polls to somehow find out what ‘normal Americans’ felt about the exchange, and some of them gave Obama the edge, a few gave it to McCain.

CNN, for example, posted a poll today that claims that most voters liked Obama’s performance better, although, if you actually read the article, you will find out that they admit to the its bias, since it contained a very small pool of Conservative participants. CNN did conclude that because of this admited imbalance, the debate should then be considered a draw. (Since CNN LOVES Obama, this means that in their mind, McCain actually won the debate, since they had been touting all week how McCain was a ‘horrible’ debater)

Also, that CNN article points out that Kerry was shown to have won the first debate, after taking similar polls at the time, and he ended up rising a few points in the ‘main street’ polls a few days later. They also point out that Kerry was also shown to have won the last debate, using the same methodology, but ended up dropping 5 points in the ‘main street’ polls a few days later. In other words… None of us will know for sure how Americans will view last night’s exchange until next week (and maybe even later polls), so this bout will almost literally go to the judges.

Did the debate somehow bring to the surface Obama’s “otherness”? Certainly Obama’s line of “My father was from Kenya…that is where I got my name” didn’t help much. Did it highlight McCain’s “grumpyness”? It clearly did not. But the most Americans don’t see debates through simple soundbites and “moments”, they usually take their time digesting the “feelings” that they got from both men, and this is quite difficult to measure. Comparing Obama’s performance to John Kerry is not necessarily a good thing for him, since Mr. Kerry lost the general election.

Either way, the result will probably not be a huge bump to either of them, so they basically survive to fight another day.

Needless to say, the exchange was entertaining, and to me, the highlight of the night was McCain’s mockery of Obama’s naive contention that he would meet with the Iranian dictator but “not allow him to say those nasty things”. McCain retorted: “Ahmadinejad is going to say ‘we want to wipe Israel off the map’ and you are going to say… ‘no’??” This provoked a huge laugh from the audience, all at the expense of Barack Obama’s man-child approach to foreign policy.

In keeping with the theme of this important moment in the debate, the McCain campaign rapidly came out with a new ad which effectively points out Obama’s almost child like knowledge of foreign policy, and his eager willingness to agree with his more knowledgeable opponent; Mr. McCain:

In a few days, we may get the count box numbers from the American people, and better assess how these two candidate really did.

I did watch the debate. I wish McCain would have zinged Obama more. He could have said: the problem began under Carter and Clinton instead of just the last 8 years. McCain needs to be less “kind”.

This provoked a huge laugh from the audience, all at the expense of Barack Obama’s man-child approach to foreign policy.

That was funny, it maade Barrack looked foolish and showed how naive he is toward countries like Iran.

I watched some snippets of the debate but missed the part about his father being from Kenya. A shameless ploy, trying to capitalize on the long-held desire of many Americans to elect someone with a foreign-born parent. Kenya may not be as exotic as Bechuanaland, Tanganyika, or Tannu Tuva, but that's partly made up for by the fact that his father never became a US citizen.

The last President known to have had a foreign-born parent was Woodrow Wilson, I think. His mother was a native of Carlisle, England. Of course we can't be sure in Bill Clinton's case, but whoever his father was, he was probably a native of Arkansas.

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