I have to admit that was a bit bizarre. And pathetic.

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Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
Ernest Benn

As a politician, too - what a fine upstanding field of endeavor! Why is it that the very people who claim to hate govt extol a very worn cog in the machine?

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Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
Ernest Benn

I thought that Obama was so much better at pointing out what he believed in, things that maybe some voters weren't really aware of. Energy, education, science, health, tax cuts.

McCain on the other hand merely repeated the sound bites of well established republican mantra, with a couple of exceptions, torture being one of them.

I think that Obama won the debate from an informative point of view, but McCain with his soundbites might get more media 'hit points'. As few American's probably will/did watch it, and those that did will probably pay less to actual policy direction than they do McCains anguished expression.

Knowing what i know, i understood Obama, but he really needs to work on very simple explanations that will grab America's imagination. He failed on that front.

Still, McCain's strength is supposed to be foreign policy, so Obama did well to do as well as he did.

I don't understand--McCain's bad judgment on what?

I agree with your assessment, mwillman. So folks know, though, I'm supporting Obama. Having said that, to me McCain came off as the proverbial "grumpy old man."

For sure the VP debate will be more interesting--and entertaining--than last night's. ;)

Cindy

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What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea. --Gandhi

Welcome to the debate Cindy.

McCains bad judgement in saying over and over again that Obama was naive.

Obama showed again and again that he has a very strong understanding of the
details of foreign policy.

McCain knows a lot about Russia but that's just more proof that McCain is still stuck in the cold war and is not focused on the twenty first century.

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Walt Whitman
"I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences."

According to the New York Times, Obama won. This is based on what the two candidates had to accomplish.

He was a Captain in the USN. Being a Naval Officer is not easy at the JO level, let alone his level. I don't like the guy, but he worked for a living, and so he wins the debate because his opponent is a pissant crybaby who's never worked a day in his life.

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"Bring me that horizon".

Actually, this seems to say it well.



Pundits: Debate Even. Viewers: Obama Clearly Won. Why the Disparity?
As so often happens, the pundit "scoring" of a presidential debate ends up quite at odds from the polls of viewers that soon follow. Here's why that happened again on Friday night, in my view.

By Greg Mitchell

(September 27, 2008) -- It often happens that the pundit "scoring" of a presidential debate ends up quite at odds from the polls of viewers that soon follow.

We've seen it again with last night's debate, which most pundits (on TV and in print) scored very or fairly even, with perhaps some recognition that Obama made some small gains because he pretty much held his own on McCain's turf. Of course, as we now know, virtually every poll taken by the networks and outside sources gave Obama an edge -- and not a small one. He easily swept surveys of undecideds, even carried a Fox focus group. At least in the polls, it was no contest.

We'll see if and how it affects the head-to-head matchup surveys in days ahead but for now we have to ask: Why did so many mainstream pundits blow it?

Of course, there is always the striving for "balance," the effects of pre-spinning, and in some cases their favoring of McCain from the outset. And, to be frank, McCain gave a pretty good account of himself.

But many pundits threw out the window what they, and others, had said beforehand, about Obama needing to appear presidential and seem expert on international matters. When he did just that in the debate, they suddenly forgot the importance they had placed on it beforehand.

But here's the key to the viewer/pundit disparity. It took awhile for McCain to build up to it but then he hammered it home near the end: Obama, he charged, lacked the "knowledge and experience" to be president.

Pundits highlighted that and said it was the key to McCain gaining at least a tie. But I didn't hear a single person on TV point out: McCain just picked Palin for vice president! How, then, could he make such a charge against Obama?

My feeling is that the Couric interview might have done for McCain what the first Nixon-Kennedy did for Nixon in 1960 -- a true watershed moment. The American voters finally "got it" about Palin and so McCain's "best moment" against Obama either fell flat with many of them, or proved laughable.

This made all the more stark with Palin AWOL during the post-debate analysis -- and Joe Biden all over the place. And with reports of McCain team alarm about her performance during the mock debate preps.

But the pundits barely recognized that the "experience" charge was a non-starter -- and that's why they scored the debate fairly even even as viewers seem to have rated it a landslide for Obama.

Pundits: Debate Even. Viewers: Obama Clearly Won. Why the Disparity?

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Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
Ernest Benn

Fox News had people text-voting (votes by text message) and the voting was over 80 percent in favor of McCain. Of course, the pundits dismissed it because pundits aren't really interested in what ordinary people think.

Both candidates did reasonably well and the entire debate left me thinking that they're two sides of the same coin and either one of them would be bad for the country. I'm particularly concerned about their interventionism and their belief that the United States has to project power over the world.

Of course, it would have been a much better debate to watch if the other presidential candidates had been allowed to participate.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

[quote]Yeah but thats just the idiots watching FOX. What the hell you think their poll is going to say? Your avatar is very appropriate.

I can see that.

Wake up, there are no other candidates.