by hilzoy
I will try to liveblog this, even though I have no idea whether I’ll be any good at it.
9:03: Where do they stand on recovery plans?
9:06: Obama: I think he looks good: collected, forceful. States principles; ties current problems to Republican philosophy.
9:07: Though on reflection, he didn’t say where he stands on the specific packages; just principles.
9:08: McCain seems to me more rambling, but folksy. I don’t like this, but some people seem to. And why was it McCain who mentioned Kennedy first?
9:10: McCain apparently commits to voting for the plan.
9:12: McCain talks about Eisenhower, and the need to hold people accountable. Obama agrees. But says: not just when there’s a crisis.
9:14: Lehrer: are there fundamental differences about what McCain would do vs. what Obama would do to get us out of this crisis?
9:15: McCain: his answer goes on about earmarks and pork-barrel spending. I have no idea what this has to do with the present crisis.
9:17: Obama: earmarks are a pretty small part of domestic spending. McCain’s tax cuts for the rich are much, much bigger. His own tax cuts, for the middle class, would do more for economic growth.
9:20: McCain goes on and on about Obama’s earmarks, and the corruption of the system. Obama: eliminating earmarks alone will not get the economy back on track. It’s a continuation of the past eight years.
9:21: McCain: Business taxes: too high. Now he’s back on earmarks. Again.
9:22: Obama: I will cut taxes on everyone making $250,000. Business taxes: low on paper, but there are so many loopholes that it’s actually lower. McCain doesn’t want to eliminate these loopholes; just shovel more tax cuts to people.
9:24: McCain: Obama has voted for bills that have earmarks. Plus, he has voted to raise taxes on people making $42,000/year. Sigh.
9:26: New question: what will you have to give up because of financial rescue plan?
9:28: I’m going to stop summarizing for a moment. I think Obama is being basically clear; if he has a weakness, it’s moving through too many points. It’s as though he’s reading a very crisp outline, very quickly.
McCain, by contrast, is rambling, but in an aggrieved sort of way.
9:30: McCain, unlike Obama, promises an actual cut: ethanol subsidies. Also, reforming defense spending. He’s in his element there, although I have no idea how his use of defense spending jargon will go over with people.
9:34: McCain: a spending freeze on everything but veterans, defense, and — darn, I missed it. Obama: no, some programs are underfunded. Somehow or other, McCain has gotten onto nuclear power. How is a mystery.
9:36: Out of nowhere, McCain says that Obama’s plans will hand control of health care over to the federal government. (Huh?) Talks about cutting spending.
9:38: McCain has been consistently saying: look at our records. Obama: look, all this spending has occurred under a President you agreed with 90% of the time. You have voted for his budgets. McCain: people know me.
9:39: Question: what are the lessons of Iraq? McCain: the war was mishandled; now we are succeeding. Had we lost, the consequences would have been dire.
9:42: Obama: the question is whether we should have gone in there at all. I said no, for various reasons, including the fact that we had not finished the job in Afghanistan. Now, things are bad. We took our eye off the ball. Lesson: we should not hesitate to use military force to keep us safe, but we should use it wisely.
9:44: McCain: The surge has worked. And “incredibly — incredibly — “, Obama did not go to Iraq.
9:44: Obama: “John likes to pretend the war started in 2007.” Cites McCain’s mistakes. I think this was quite effective.
9:46: McCain: Obama doesn’t know the difference between strategy and tactics. Also: he will not acknowledge the success of the surge.
9:47: McCain says Obama voted to cut funding for troops. Obama says: we both voted against funding bills that had things we disagreed with.
9:48: I think McCain came close to losing his temper.
9:50: New question: more troops to Afghanistan? Obama: yes.
9:51: Obama brings up Pakistan.
9:53: McCain says he will not repeat mistake of abandoning Afghanistan. (Me: I thought he did that. In 2003.)
9:56: Back and forth about what Obama said about Pakistan. Obama brings up various threats McCain has made.
9:57: Obama talks Pakistan. In my judgment, he’s quite astute.
9:59: McCain says Obama doesn’t understand Pakistan. Them for some reason, he goes over his entire history of war votes. He sounds earnest and sober. I have no idea what the point is.
Telling story of bracelet of dead soldier. She promised his mother her son’s death would not be in vain.
10:01: Obama: President must make strategic judgments, and make them wisely. We took our eyes off the ball in Afghanistan. You have not consistently been concerned with Afghanistan.
10:02: I think Obama has gotten under McCain’s skin.
10:04: Question: Iran?
McCain: Threat to Israel, to the region. “League of Democracies”. It would help us to impose new sanctions. (How?)
10:06: Obama: The single thing that has strengthened Iran most recently is the war in Iraq. (Good.)
10:08: Obama says he doesn’t think we can do sanctions without engaging countries who are not democracies. Also, we need negotiations.
10:09: McCain: Obama wants to negotiate with Ahmedinejad, whose name he has trouble with. This somehow legitimizes them, and even implies that they’re doing the right thing.
10:10: Obama has a nice, sharp response. Brings up Kissinger’s call for negotiations without preconditions. Explains what preconditions are. Pointed.
10:12: Obama brings up Spain. (*giggles*)
10:13: I am clearly, undeniably biassed. So I cannot assess how McCain’s repeated “what Senator Obama doesn’t understand” stuff would go over with an undecided voter.
10:15: Testy, testy…
10:17: New question: Russia. Obama: Russia’s actions in Georgia are unacceptable. We should make that clear. But no return to the Cold War. We need to cooperate on e.g. loose nukes.
10:19: McCain harps on Obama’s naivete again. Energy. Pipelines. Places “where I have spent significant amounts of time.”
10:20: McCain really is a lot more coherent on foreign policy than on other topics. I really disagree with him, but he’s pretty clear.
10:24: Obama brings it round to energy, and says that you have to “walk the walk, not just talk the talk” on alternative energy.
10:26: Question: what are the odds of another 9/11?
McCain: much less. 9/11 commission, and his role in creating it. (Bipartisan, reaching across the aisle…)
We have to have trained interrogators, so that we never torture a prisoner ever again.
Good for McCain.
10:28: Obama: we have done some things, but not enough on hardening chemical plants, on ports, etc.
Obama said we need missile defense. Ugh.
We need to focus on al Qaeda, not Iraq.
Also: how we are perceived matters for fight against terrorism. He wants to restore our image abroad. Gives McCain credit on torture.
10:31: Obama, who has (I think) been needling McCain, was just quite gracious. McCain responded with another ‘Senator Obama doesn’t get it.’
10:33: Obama: we are still too focussed on Iraq, and it was weakened us. Plus, it costs money we need elsewhere.
10:34: McCain, somewhat out of the blue, says that Obama lacks the experience and judgment he needs. “We have seen this stubbornness before, in this administration.”
10:35: Obama: his father, who thought of America as a beacon when he was in Kenya. He wants to restore that.
10:37: McCain: when he came back from Vietnam, he worked to get POWs back. He knows how to heal the wounds of war.
McCain had a stronger close, I think.
***
I thought it was close. A lot, I think, will depend on how McCain struck people: to me, he was annoying and dismissive. Will it work? It didn’t on me, but I’m not, um, normal.
Chris Matthews just made the same point, which makes me want to rethink it: “will his obvious contempt” turn voters off?
Signing off…
***
Actually, not quite signing off: on reflection, I think that the “story” out of this (and I haven’t read around yet) is likely to be McCain’s saying that Obama doesn’t have the experience or the judgment to be President. I suspect that was a mistake, not just because it was (imho) over the line into incivility, but also because it just begs for commentary about McCain’s having voted for the war in Iraq in the first place.
I also think that McCain’s calling Obama inflexible was a mistake: I don’t think Obama comes off that way, and it seemed like enough of a stretch that it might have undermined McCain’s credibility more generally.
Obama, I thought, missed a few opportunities. The most important, I thought, was when McCain said he would never repeat the mistake of abandoning Afghanistan. The response “But John, you did: back in 2003, when you voted to take our focus away from Afghanistan in order to wage a war of choice against a country that had not attacked us” was just begging and pleading to be made. He was also, I thought, a bit tense.
As I said, close. But this was supposed to be McCain’s strong debate, remember.
9:15- Earmarks! And the bear paternity joke! That McCain is a riot.
Okay, so move this htere: So is the live-blogging the debate thread? Because I’m now waiting to see if Obama brings up Sarah Palin’s requests for earmarks, now that McCain has denounced earmarks again.
And no, he went the higher road by explaining how relatively insignificant earmarks are.
Should McCain really bring up “Miss Congeniality”?
McCain’s jokes aren’t sounding too hot in a silent auditorium.
“My friends”: drink!
Am I crazy, or is Barry kinda beating him up on points here?
EARMARKS!!! THE SCOURGE OF HUMANITY!!*
*after Liberalism.
/mccain
McCain is being aggressive, I think. Obama should be more so.
Should go after McCain on lobbyists in his campaign.
I think Obama scores on the tax cuts vs. health care issue.
I think McCain’s other exemption @9:34 was entitlements.
Can someone PLEASE just say “Keating Five” when McCain is talking about being against corruption?
9:36 Both Obama and McCain totally dodged the question of what they’d cut, instead both launching into discussions of what they want to do. I guess they’re getting into it now, somewhat, but of course neither of them wants to say anything very specific. Can’t really blame them since nobody knows what next year’s budget will look like or what this bailout will actually cost anyway.
McCain says he wants a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran’s affairs, and something I didn’t catch. Also calls for 40 new nuclear power plants.
McCain also says we have to go through the government agencies and find the ones that aren’t working well and “eliminate them”. Eliminate? Not fix? Uh, what if they actually served some useful purpose?
Miss Congeniality joke for the second time.
6:39 Maverick x2 in one sentence: CHUG.
Obama said “orgy” a few minutes earlier though. Edgy!
I wish one of them at least acted like they knew what to do about the bailout. Their talking points haven’t caught up with reality yet.
In reference to performance, Jim Leher is doing a decent job, at least to my ethanol muddled brain.
Obama says McCain is right too often, I think. Congeniality is one thing, but you don’t want to give the impression that you mostly agree with him.
“I think Obama is being basically clear; if he has a weakness, it’s moving through too many points.”
I think it took Obama roughly 30 minutes to gain his footing.
Just when I was wondering when he was going to mention President Bush, he did for the first time — around the 30-minute mark.
Soon after, he used his first memorable phrase — the only memorable phrase of the debate so far — when he brought up Bush’s name again and said that McCain has supported the president’s “orgy of spending.”
Got my attention.
So did McCain — out of left field — when he proposed a “spending freeze,” after both candidates were pressed numerous times about the inevitable effects of the $700 million Wall Street bailout.
Classic McCain, who clearly likes the Hail Mary pass.
This idea of a “spending freeze” (with exceptions Hilzoy noted) is extreme and probably unworkable, although if I relied on government spending for various things that a McCain Administration would consider non-essential, I would be worried.
However, I’d give McCain points for at least conceding the point that neither candidate will be able to fulfill their pie-in-the-sky campaign promises. Obama repeatedly dodged Lehrer’s question.
“McCain, by contrast, is rambling, but in an aggrieved sort of way.”
Hilzoy, neither of us are McCain fans. But I would suggest that some viewers would look at McCain’s anger as feistiness and spirit.
Of course, he’s no Mr. Congeniality.
Is it just me, or is McCain’s check bulging like a xenomorph is gonna pop out.
Props to Hilzoy.
Just adding a comment here and there is tough enough, much less liveblogging, while trying to adequately digesting the whole debate.
If you don’t say it out loud (re: strikes in Pakistan) HOW BOUT WAR WITH RUSSIA?????
First mistake by Lehrer.
The back-and-forth on Iraq was lively and he should have kept it going. Both scored points.
To borrow from Hilzoy:
Obama: “John likes to pretend the war started in 2007.”
McCain: Obama doesn’t know the difference between strategy and tactics. Also: he will not acknowledge the success of the surge.
Is Obama trying to needle McCain a little bit, to maybe induce a blowup here?
I give Obama credit for trying but he just butchered McCain’s “Ba-ba-bomb Iraq,” mentioning if McCain wants “to sing songs about Iraq, that’s OK.”
Many viewers aren’t going to know what the hell he was talking about. Should have referenced the Beach Boys and quoted the whole damn line.
WTF? What does McCain as 33-year old midshipment have to do with respecting Reagan? He respected Reagan then? Reagan wasn’t even in the movies yet!
And the litany of wars he has supported…. were there any he didn’t support?
McCain talking about the dangers of cross-border strikes into Pakistan. Er, aren’t we already doing that?
McCain says Obama is irresponsible for saying he would attack Pakistan. Obama says hey! Nobody is talking about attacking Pakistan! Plus, you sang a song about attacking Iran, so, WTF.
Anecdotes about mothers are touching, but Presidents are supposed to be thinking strategically, not validating Gold Star mothers’ feelings.
Man has this campaign ever sharpened Obama.
Pooh: I think that’s what he was doing with the “sing songs about Iraq” — although McCain is making a pretty good retort right now, talking about a mother of a marine he talked to.
Obama finally brought up “making good judgments.”
This is where he can trump McCain — not questioning the man’s valor or singing ability.
McCain, fer Chrissake, the two wars are connected because of US incompetence! We can’t keep fighting both!
Jesus.
Man has this campaign ever sharpened Obama.
I have to agree. He’s been a lot sharper than he was in the primaries. He’s been really good at responding to McCain’s bogus charges.
Pooh: “Can someone PLEASE just say “Keating Five” when McCain is talking about being against corruption?”
To Bernard’s point about Obama not being agressive enough — this would indeed be something to bring up (if economics comes up again).
Oh, goodie. McCain wants to form his own UN because he hates Russia and Iran.
Pooh: I think that’s what he was doing with the “sing songs about Iraq” — although McCain is making a pretty good retort right now, talking about a mother of a marine he talked to.
Yeah, it seemed like he ALMOST got him, but McCain was able to reign himself in before going off.
“Is it just me, or is McCain’s check bulging like a xenomorph is gonna pop out.”
I’m sure Michelle Malkin is blogging even now about the illegal aliens living illegally in McCain’s illegal cheeks, where he houses illegal aliens. Illegally.
One thing about Obama that’s freaking me out is his ability to explain his Senate votes in a concise and effective way.
If only this guy had been around in 2004…
Jacob: “Miss Congeniality joke for the second time.
“6:39 Maverick x2 in one sentence: CHUG.”
McCain does make for one helluva drinking game, my friend.
How I miss college.
yes, because what Ahmadenijad lacks is a platform…
Retarding comment by McCain on not dealing with dictatorships until they change, and then citing Nixon and China. Right Johnny, because the 1960s was an unbroken litany of human rights advances on the Chinese mainland.
I like that Obama is popping him with Kissinger on the “no preconditions” bit.
This is fun, but I better get upstairs with the wife.
She is enjoy the CNN broadcast on hi-def –anaylsts point-scoring the debate on the left and right of the TV screen, a focus group doing the same underneath it.
I found it distracting.
I hope McCain can be baited into irritability. McCain has a problem with sounding whiny when he gets pissed off.
McCain also seems to have a problem with having a smug smile while Obama is discussing life-and-death issues.
Spain!
Spain!
Spain!
F’in preconditions
Preconditions!Preconditions!Preconditions!Preconditions!Preconditions!Preconditions!Preconditions!
“McCain also seems to have a problem with having a smug smile”
It’s officially known as the “creepy smile”.
McCain: “I don’t even have a (presidential) seal yet.”
Good dig at Obama.
But, again, like the Beach Boys line, this is inside-baseball stuff.
It does show that McCain is fighting back — and I think he finds Obama contemptable.
His “Oh, please” just now was a pretty good putdown of Obama, who looked baffled.
“I am not parsing words,” a frustrated Obama shot back.
Looks like McCain won’t have the Senior Moment that Chris Matthews was begging him to have in the pre-game.
REAGAN! REAGAN! PRECONDITIONS!
I think the right will call Obama arrogant tomorrow, for repeatedly saying “When I am President” while McCain is saying things like “I’m not presuming to set the White House guest list” and “I haven’t even got a seal yet”. Completely idiotic, but I’ll bet it’s one of the major talking points in the wash-up.
McCain is going to get his head handed to him on the Kissinger bit.
I think McCain just looked like an a** on the subject of talks. Maybe not – I’m not unbiased, but the smug laugh is really annoying.
McCain: “I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters: K – G – B.”
Great, great line.
And it separates himself from Mr. Bush.
For those of us hoping Obama would knock out the 72-year-old candidate tonight, it ain’t happening.
McCain sure sounds like he’s threatening war with Russia to me.
i know i’m biased, but McCain sounds pissy, annoyed, and mean. Obama sounds calmer, more statesman-like.
Very nice pivot on the energy issue by Obama there.
Jacob: The drinking game has had one major letdown — we’re almost finished and not single POW reference.
Sobriety scores a point.
I think the talks are a losing topic for McCain. He’s not justifying WHY he wouldn’t sit down and talk with them, so his repeating of the accusation as if it’s innately insane sounds like a weird obsession. To me.
McCain keeps giggling and laughing at things Obama is saying. I have no idea how that plays with someone who doesn’t despise him, but I sure don’t think it looks good for him.
McCain keeps talking over Obama in that unstoppable-grandpa way. I’m not sure Obama can do anything about it.
“Obama sounds calmer . . .”
Sometimes too calm, allowing McCain to sneak in too many falsehoods.
Jacob: Our first Joe Lieberman reference.
Drink up!
I like how working with Lieberman somehow counts as bipartisan…
Obama should have insisted on correcting McCain’s comments on nuclear waste.
Mistake. He’s giving McCain too much time.
I’m reasonably sure McCain referred at some point to what the McCain administration would do, or something that would happen under it.
For those of us hoping Obama would knock out the 72-year-old candidate tonight, it ain’t happening.
Actually, the knockout onus is on McCain. Obama just has to not make a hash of things, and the news for the next few days is going to be about the bailout anyway.
“I like how working with Lieberman somehow counts as bipartisan . . .”
For me, there is just way too much man-love between Lieberman and McCain.
He has, Gary, and more than once. Won’t stop the right-wing from calling Obama presumptuous though.
Oh.my.god. SDI ended the Cold War. McCain is just relentless with BS.
“We seem to have come full circle again . . .”
McCain — who I thought was a bland debater in the primaries — is actually managing to close out this debate with a closing summary in response to a question.
Sharp.
The first hundred times, maybe; he’s been using it for years.
I’m not sure, but Colin Powell may have used it first.
“Specifc dates for withdrawal” crap a minus for McCain. IMO: harping . in effect, on yesterday’s issue.
Not snart
Star Wars ended the Cold War? Perhaps I have judged The Phantom Menace too harshly.
“and the news for the next few days is going to be about the bailout anyway”
Yeah, these two could have come to blows tonight or even kissed and the Bailout is still Topic A.
“The first hundred times, maybe; he’s been using it for years.”
Must confess: I had never heard him use it — and if I haven’t, I’d bet a few million watching haven’t, either.
Oops – McCain’s close is a sneer (“Obama’s experience”)
& “Love the veterans” ? WTF??
McCain loves the veteran — “I love them. And that’s going to be my job” — and we should all tear up now.
POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!
McCain: Obama is showing poor judgment by refusing to acknowledge that he made a bad decision in supporting the surge.
And the decision to support the invasion of Iraq, Brute?
Oops.
Thank God — he got a “POW” in.
Finally.
“Star Wars ended the Cold War? Perhaps I have judged The Phantom Menace too harshly.”
It’s all because of the Soviet Union employing Jar Jar Binks.
Waited until the end, but he got in the POW! Knew it had to happen.
Good debate.
These guys DO NOT like each other.
“Contempt” comes to mind.
Not sure if the event would have changed an Independent’s mind, however; so I’d count it as a win for Obama.
Okay, so I had to be away from the tv for half an hour, so I’m watching the rerun of the debate on my local PBS station, and am only up to the first 39 minutes so far.
And he just said that the lesson of Iraq was don’t have a bad strategy that will cause you to fail unless you change it?
Uh, righhhhttt.
Star Wars ended the Cold War?
We had TIE fighters buzzing around the planet ready to shoot down pesky ICBMs!
I think this was a slight win for Obama, just by calling out some of McCain’s crap, especially the “talks w/o preconditions.” McCain just kinda kept going a lot, and Lehrer had a hell of a time getting him to stop. Whoever mentioned McCain’s talking was an un-interruptable grandpa style was right.
(Darn you Gary! Your joke is much funnier than mine.)
I didn’t watch it, but is it true that Obama refused to credit the surge as a success? If so, good. If not–well, I don’t have high hopes for serious discussions in a Presidential debate anyway.
Gary- And he just said that the lesson of Iraq was don’t have a bad strategy that will cause you to fail unless you change it?
I have a tablecloth in the washer from my friend and I spitting a screwdriver out at that moment.
From the Caucus blog on NYT:
“Mr. McCain says: “It’s an existential threat to Israel.” They’ve used this phrase before, meaning that it is a threat to Israel’s existence. But they ought to explain it, otherwise it sounds to voters like we’re trying to protect Jean Paul Sartre.”
Probably a draw, though I’m a bit disappointed. I hope that’s just because I thought Obama would score a KO and he didn’t.
I do think he should have been more aggressive, both in his direct answers and in responding to McCain’s claims.
I didn’t watch it, but is it true that Obama refused to credit the surge as a success? If so, good.
It’s more like he popped McCain in the mouth over the fact that we shouldn’t be in the war in the first place.
My discounted market-adjusted ($0.02) opinion: a draw. Both men proved equally adept at spouting cliches, platitudes and talking-points. Both men proved equally adept at “managing” a set-piece debate. My opinion of the candidates – and their chances – : unchanged.
Back to Square One. (I.e., President Obama in jan.)
Here is a quick and dirty transcript that’s still in progress that everyone can use to find versions of what they remember.
Points that amazed me: McCain answers that the way he’ll lead us out of the financial crisis is fighting earmarks:
Hooboy. That’s the solution to the financial crisis?
Then my previous point:
Hoo-doggie.
Biden had a small bit on NBC. Then they moved to Guliani. Did any of the networks talk to Palin?
In the closing it’s really clear that the only issue here is Iraq and whether the initial decision to invade was a good one. McCain kept bringing it back to the surge to avoid discussing that, and Obama kept bringing it back to the initial decision to invade to avoid discussing the surge. I don’t blame either of them for their desire to avoid those two areas. But to me (unsurprisingly) the decision whether to invade was by far the more important one, and that’s one where their opinions differ greatly, although McCain doesn’t want to broadcast that too loudly.
I do think the surge is an area of vulnerability for Obama. Americans like to win, and they’re also pragmatists who want to make the best of a bad job. Not sure Obama made enough mention of the gigantic cost of staying in Iraq, though.
There was, finally, a P.O.W. reference at the end but it was so fast that I think most people would’ve missed it. Plus, I had drunk my solitary beer by then. I’m too old for drinking games really.
Overall I think the whole thing was remarkably cogent, mature, and rational with surprisingly little recourse to talking points or mockery. I don’t like McCain one little bit, but this was the part of him that I think those who have admired him in the past have seen. This is his home turf.
But I think that mature tone also left the viewer without a knockout winner on some gotcha point. So the independent voter waiting for that gotcha moment will be disappointed and actually have to make a decision based on which policies they like better. A tragedy!
Good to see Obama getting a lot of prime-time exposure. For all the exposure in the primaries, I think people need to see more of Obama on TV just to get used to this idea that a 40-something black man could be qualified to be President. I think a lot of basically decent people have trouble believing that because they don’t have very much personal experience with African-Americans and have a view shaped by the media portrayal of black men. It kind of pains me to say that, but there we go. So seeing him up there, sharp as hell – though McCain was sharp too – knowledgeable, confident in his judgement, I thought that was a good thing. And they may mock him for “When I’m President” but that’s the idea that needs to be accepted: he can be President. In fact, if the polls today stayed the way they are, he will be President. So I think, better to get that idea accepted by people than to say “if I’m President” and risk sounding like you don’t think you can do it.
Rudy G. just got on whatever station I’m watching and said “Well I thought McCain won this debate hugely” which, dude, come on. Won? Nobody “won” that debate, it wasn’t about winning. For once, it was about informing people about what the two candidates really want and where they differ. Imagine that. So it was a little sad to go right back to the bullshit politics of instantly declaring your candidate a “winner” and repeating it until we all just give up protesting.
Biden had a small bit on NBC. Then they moved to Guliani. Did any of the networks talk to Palin?
AFAIK, Palin flat-out refused…
“I think a lot of basically decent people have trouble believing that because they don’t have very much personal experience with African-Americans and have a view shaped by the media portrayal of black men.”
The bad news.
McCain said “…so we never have to torture prisoners again.”
Tacitly admitting we torture prisoners. Curious.
“So it was a little sad to go right back to the bullshit politics of instantly declaring your candidate a ‘winner’ and repeating it until we all just give up protesting.”
This is where the word “spin” gained its political meaning from.
Only saw the last 45mins, but McCain was much more steady in the Foreign Policy section. Obama was pretty good, but he was a wee bit forced. IMO.
McCain lied a lot.
Biden’s follow-up on MSNBC was weeeeaaak.
JV-VP Little Rudy G was much more fun to listen to.
Sarahcudda was apparently busy with some Adderall and the last five years of Newsweek.
It would be interesting if someone did the positive/negative statement analysis on the transcript. It seemed to me that McCain spent a lot of time on stone-throwing and not as much on describing his solutions.
McCain also seemed to go out of his way to highlight how old he is. I didn’t expect so many, “Back in the day, I went to that country” stories.
Gary – the good news is that it isn’t going to be close.
“Gary – the good news is that it isn’t going to be close.”
I’ve seen too many predictions fail in too many elections to buy into any any more.
Obama praised McCain for saying that he opposed torture. Andrew Sullivan says that it was a “graceful” move on Obama’s part. But Obama did not say that McCain voted for torture in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Obama, in fact, except one time, did not convey what a liar and slimeball McCain is. The one time was when McCain accused Obama of voting against funding for the troops, and Obama replied that McCain had also voted against funding for the troops; Obama had voted against the funding bill with no timetable and McCain had voted against the funding bill with a timetable. But Obama made no general statement about McCain’s dishonesty.
I wish Obama would stop saying “When I’m President” so much, I don’t think it will play well, it sounds cocky.
WTF with McCain’s League of Democracies??? Every time he said that I got a mental picture of the Justice League and giggled. But seriously would that replace the UN, how would that even work, just bizarre.
The spending freeze was so left field too. It may play well to people who have no knowledge of the federal budget process so maybe he’ll get away with that one. But I used to work in the civil service and when he said that I was baffled.
But overall I though McCain did well, I was hoping he would lose his temper or have a senior moment. Oh well. Obama was okay but I thought McCain was stronger.
I understand that EVERYBODY here hates the Rethuglicans, but look, this was a debate on foreign policy. McCain has had a lot more experience in foreign policy, and that can be debated whether it is good or bad. Obama’s experience is mostly in Chicago Public Schools via IL state senate and Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and his effectiveness can be judged on that.
Here is another partial transcript.
For Donald’s sake, and anyone else, here’s what’s relevant to the “surge” (in two parts, due to Typepad’s new length limit on comments with links):
[continued in pt. II]
I can’t score this from an undecided voter viewpoint, so I guess I’ll have to wait to see what the polls say. I was personally disappointed with the results, I had hoped to see Obama score more points against McCain than I heard tonight, but maybe that’s because I tend not to count a point scored on something which to me seems so obvious as to barely merit discussion.
I thought McCain repeatedly throughout the debate made mischaracterizations of Obama’s prior statements and positions, or favorably shaded the context of his own record, in ways which while not being outright lies, walked up very close to the line between lies and normal political spin and double talk.
It seemed to me that Obama was far too deferential towards McCain, and spent too much of his time working at playing defense trying to clean up the viewer’s impression of his (Obama’s) record in a followup coming on the heels of something fishy that McCain had just said.
Also, McCain adroitly used the topic time limits to sneak in some mischaracterizations right at the end of each topic, effectively shorting Obama of a chance to rebut them in detail. It seemed like Obama was more frequently the debater asked a question first, and McCain was more frequently given the last word on a given topic, which gave McCain a structural advantage. I could be wrong – I’d have to go over a transcript to see if it actually happened that was or if this was just a subjective impression.
McCain on the other hand was on the offense for most of the debate, and seemed to have set some sort of objective to use the phrase “he clearly doesn’t understand” as many times as possible in the debate to create by force of pure assertion (rather than by marshalling facts in detail) an impression in the mind of the viewer that McCain is the expert and Obama the novice. I think McCain did a good job of using that rhetorical technique repeatedly throughout the debate. I wish I knew whether the casual viewer is influenced by this “just because I say so” style of argument or not – clearly McCain invested a lot of effort into using it.
So Obama was too passive and did not take the fight to McCain as aggressively as I would have liked, like a tennis player who is always volleying and never serving.
I also thought that Obama was not as successful as I would have liked at tying McCain to the Bush administration. McCain painted an outrageously exaggerated potrait of himself as a long time critic and opponent of the Bush admin – an low information voter could be forgiven for forming the impression that McCain had spent most of the last 8 years in the Democratic party rather than in the GOP, as if he was Joe Lieberman somehow.
McCain showed up and talked all about himself as McCain 2000, not the McCain of 2005-2008 who has been sucking up to the neocons and the theocons ever since he decided he was next in line to run for the GOP nomination, and Obama let him get away with it.
Obama needs to run against Bush’s heir, not a guy who constantly sidesteps every criticism by declaiming his independence from the GOP. I wanted Obama to stop and ask McCain directly: “so John, has the Republican party done anything right in the last 8 years that you support and agree with? And if not, why have you remained in that party?”
In Obama’s defense, it may be that their strategy in this debate (given that foreign policy was seen as McCain’s strength) was to minimize differences with McCain and not commit any major gaffes, so as not to create any issues which could be used as talking points to score big gains in the polls. Perhaps they were playing a rope-a-dope strategy here. If playing defense was what they were aiming for, then they got what they wanted.
I hope he is much more aggressive going after McCain in the next debates, and doesn’t let McCain get away with running as if the was the Bush admin’s biggest critic when the record doesn’t merit it.
Pt. II:
Continued in Pt. III.
Pt. III:
Then they went on to a question from Lehrer about Afghanistan. And, yeah, McCain said “so we make sure we don’t ever torture a prisoner ever again.”
The one time was when McCain accused Obama of voting against funding for the troops, and Obama replied that McCain had also voted against funding for the troops; Obama had voted against the funding bill with no timetable and McCain had voted against the funding bill with a timetable. But Obama made no general statement about McCain’s dishonesty.
I thought that was one of Obama’s strongest moments in the debate, because it showed that he wasn’t going to be trapped by that “I was for it before I was against it” crap.
“Obama’s experience is mostly in Chicago Public Schools via IL state senate and Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and his effectiveness can be judged on that.”
Of course, this is nonsense. Obama’s experience is as a State Senator from 1997 to 2004, as a U.S. Senator since his election in November, 2004, in his earlier years of work as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer, in his years as teacher of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, in his books, and one could thrown in his experience as president of the Harvard Law Review, and the rest of his life.
Hilzoy has well reviewed his experience in the State Senate, and as a Senator. So, yeah, all of that can be judged, and that’s entirely fair.
Of course, DaveC and the crazy folks want to make up a lot of weird wacko stuff about Obama being some sort of Manchurian candidate programed by Extreme Commies, no matter that the only evidence they can find is, well, they use a lot of adjectives. So there must be something there. Because! They say so!
It’s got as much connection to reality as the stuff thrown at McCain by Bush in South Carolina in 2000. (After all, Obama has two black children!)
ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I tend to agree.
DaveC,
I almost understand your point, but i really don’t yet know what McCain’s real experience in foreign policy is. He talks about visiting countries, but he tends to be mostly militarily oriented which is not the same as foreign policy. He has never had a leadership role that I know of in real foreign policy decision making has he. Correct me if I am wong, I wuld like to know.
Also, since judgement is really the important thing, what judgements or decisions has McCain made relating to foreign policy that would vindicate the estimate that he has good judgement? Don’t say the surge, because the jury is still out on that.
McCain said “…so we never have to torture prisoners again.”
Tacitly admitting we torture prisoners. Curious.
I noticed that too – if Obama had wanted to emphasize rather than minimize differences with McCain, that would have been something to pounce on, and perhaps even pivot into the explosive issue of investigations of possible war crimes and the legal cuplpability of top Bush administration officials.
That may be too “left wing” a position to run on and win with in a very close US election.
I felt like we saw the conservative/centrist side of Obama tonight, not a progressive Obama.
Also, Obama defense of investing in American moral authority and soft power rather than using military force came into the debate too late and he did not define it very well – it was expressed indirectly rather than as a broad overarching theme. I want to hear him stand up and explain to an audience who are concerned about our security how important a factor our moral standing is, as a force multiplier and as something which helped to win the Cold War for us far more than Reagan’s SDI. Talk about how the Helsinki accords helped to shake the Soviet Union as much as or more than any missiles did.
That to me is one of the rationales for Obama’s “talks without preconditions” stance – an American President who wields the sort of moral authority we used to enjoy can use direct contacts with other heads of state as an positive asset in pushing our agenda and values, rather than worrying about how we may get taken advantage of. Nobody is afraid of negotiations when they are negotiating from a position of greater authority – only the weak are afraid of talks which don’t come with a guarantee of success.
Also, is it just me, or did McCain throw Ronald Reagan under the proverbial bus when bragging about how he (McCain) was opposed to sending the Marines to Beruit?
Foreing policy specialist McCain claimed that Pakistan was a failed state before Musharraf. WTF?
Another missed opportunity by Obama – McCain talking about veterans should have led to a forceful pivot into the Webb GI bill: “veterans don’t need just words, they need action. You were missing in action when they needed you on the Webb GI bill”.
“Foreing policy specialist McCain claimed that Pakistan was a failed state before Musharraf. WTF?”
That’s certainly defensible. Pakistan had a coup attempt in 1951, and successful military coups in 1958, 1970, and 1999. That’s arguably hardly the record of a successful democracy. It may not be a “failed state,” but it hasn’t been a terribly successful democracy.
TLTinABQ, only in a round about way. The troops were already in Lebanon when McCain went to Congress. He voted to ge them out after the bombing of the Marine barracks. So in a way he lied. Th next question will be if much is made of it.
Interesting that Nate and Sean @538 liveblogging came away with a much better impression of Obama than I did, and link to a CBS poll of 500 uncommitted voters that scores it as an Obama win by a fair margin.
I may be grading on a curve, judging the candidate that I support more harshly. I thought that Obama left many opportunities on the table for really digging into McCain, but maybe that isn’t what the uncommitted voters are looking for.
I want partisan red meat, whereas they may instead be looking for somebody who looks presidential and that may translate as being less partisan and more solid and steady. If so, then I can see how Obama scored well. He did a good job of coming across as unflappable.
If we are lucky, this may be like 1980, where late undecided voters who were unsure about the challenger Reagan came out of the debates feeling that he had crossed a threshold of acceptability, and that what Obama needs to do in these debates is to cross that threshold (rather than tearing down McCain). If Obama is accomplishing that goal now with these voters, that is good news.
I think the deal with foreign policy is not whether we agree with other countries and entities, but how th US responds to the opposition, sometimes violent and dangerous opposition, from those who disagree with us. So it still boils down to how much of a threat are the non-sovereign Al Qaeda strongholds, countries that support Wahhabi expansionism, Iran and various HizbAllah initiatives, a belligerent and opportunistic Russia, more isolated problems like North Korea, Cuba and Venezeuela.
Wheter Germany and France and Great Britain approve of what we do is not so much of an issue. Even less of a concern is the approval rating that the USA gets from its enemies.
This transcript is now complete.
Y’know, DaveC, without quibbling with your phraseology, or depth, I don’t actually disagree with anything you said there.
Who you expect to argue with you, though, and speak up in favor of worrying about “the approval rating that the USA gets from its enemies,” I’m not clear.
Of course, not letting well enough alone, I might point out that countries and peoples are far more complicated than entities that can simply be divided into binary categories of “enemies” and “friends.” Countries have interests more than they have friends, as the saying goes, and we also try to turn enemies into friends. Most Iranians like the U.S., and that’s something to build on. How we deal with the Iranian government is another matter, but seeking their “approval” isn’t something I’m aware of anyone speaking up for.
On “Wheter Germany and France and Great Britain approve of what we do is not so much of an issue,” I’m kinda all “wha?” about. But last I looked, yes, those were “friends” of ours, certainly allies, insofar as countries have them.
Obama let him off the hook on torture. I wish there had been a torture question, but there weren’t really any questions, were there? I missed the first 30 minutes or so, but I would have asked “Sen McCain you voted for a torture compromise that allows military interrogators to be temped into the CIA should circumstances appear to warrant torture, and the CIA is not under the Army Field Manual, and therefore torture is broadly possible. How do you feel about this loophole and what do you think about waterboarding specifically?”
Cricket time.
Wheter Germany and France and Great Britain approve of what we do is not so much of an issue. Even less of a concern is the approval rating that the USA gets from its enemies.
Do you truly believe that?
I was a part of the initial invasion of Iraq, and had our enemies not believed they would receive fair and just treatment at the hands of U.S. forces, the fight would have been immeasurably more difficult. From men and women I served with, the account from the first Golf War is similar.
How our enemies perceive us is critically important to their ability to recruit people on the margins, and the more widespread goodwill towards U.S. foreign policy is throughout the rest of the world, the smaller the recruitment pool for those who wish to do us harm.
Soft power is an enormous political tool. Perhaps a brief wiki brush up on the term would be in order.
Correction: Gulf War
Wheter Germany and France and Great Britain approve of what we do is not so much of an issue. Even less of a concern is the approval rating that the USA gets from its enemies.
That seems to me like an anti-internationalist attitude with roots in the paleocon disdain for the UN and going back further with roots in the pre-WW2 isolationist attitudes of the right in this country.
We didn’t even win the Cold War against the Soviet Union without allies, and today our share of global GDP is less than it was in the 1950s, and our financial services industry is in a most literal fashion surviving only by the good graces of foreign countries and their central banks, who could deal a devastating blow to American power if they wished to.
IMHO your vision of a US which can protect itself primarily using hard military power is very naiive and takes a very limited view of the threats which we face.
YMMV, reasonable people may disagree about tactics in pursuit of common goals, etc.
I was a part of the initial invasion of Iraq, and had our enemies not believed they would receive fair and just treatment at the hands of U.S. forces, the fight would have been immeasurably more difficult. From men and women I served with, the account from the first Gulf War is similar.
This is an immensely important point. Moral authority is a force multiplier.
If you want an example which is more distant from the present and hence less embroiled in the controversies of today, go read the historian Niall Ferguson’s account of the role prisoner surrender played in helping the allies to win WW1 in the closing months of 1918 in his book The Pity of War.
Right to the end the Germans were inflicting more KIA and WIA on the Western Allies than they were receiving in turn, by a large margin – the Allies were losing the battle of attrition by those measures. What caused a collapse of the German effort was a shift in the percentage of soldiers who, expecting decent treatment and a good meal, were willing to surrender rather than fight on.
10:01: Obama: President must make strategic judgments, and make them wisely. We took our eyes off the ball in Afghanistan. You have not consistently been concerned with Afghanistan.
I dislike John McCain. And I dislike his idea about how to win the war in Iraq. for him, the word strategic is critical as we saw tonight.
As is brought extremely well in recent issue of the Atlantic, McCain thinks that we could have won the Vietnam if we had only used the kind of counter-insurgency strategy that Petraeus is using, supposedly, in Iraq.
Specifically, the counter-insurgency involves sending troops into neighborhoods to become part of the milieu, not to attack and retreat as Westmoreland did.
It is very important to McCain that we affirm Petraeus because in so doing we affirm McCain father.
Tonight, we learned that McCain want to employ that strategy in Western Pakistan.
he is one scary man.
What I meant was that the US doesn’t necessarily have to get formal political approval on the broadest scale, the UN or even the EU, and even if there are disagrements in particular US policies, for our allies, this is a normal state of events.
The issue of what to do about Iran, with an anti-everything-USA govt and a populace that wants to be be less theocratic is pretty tricky Iran has elections, and theoretically this could be changed by a popular vote, if only candidates were not summarily thrown off the ballot.
Incertus at 11:29 nailed one of the things that struck me. I could see Obama getting a little pissed over the accusation, but he was just so cool about it. Moments like that are what make me proud to have him as my nominee.
9:47: McCain says Obama voted to cut funding for troops. Obama says: we both voted against funding bills that had things we disagreed with.
This was a strong moment for Obama — an un-Kerry moment, in fact. I just checked the videotape: Obama specifically said that McCain voted against a bill to “fund the troops” because it had a timetable, whereas he (Obama) voted against a funding “a mission without a timetable”. The argument, said Obama, was over timetables, not funding.
Imagine if Kerry had said, “I voted for the $87 billion before the Republicans insisted that it had to be borrowed money.” That argument was about taxes, not “funding the troops”.
Obama did not press the point enough, for my taste: Republicans always pretend that the argument is something other than what it really is. That’s how people of bad faith try to win arguments, and they have to be called out for it every single time. But even one time is a good start.
–TP
Regarding the issue of strategy vs. tactics which was a bone of contention in this debate, it seems to me that the two candidates are using the term strategy to talk about two different levels of abstraction.
For McCain “strategy” means a high level view of the means whereby we are attempting to win the war in Iraq – not the low level tactics, but a 30,000 ft. view of what we are doing in terms of how many troops we deploy, what missions they are given, what weapons, training and tactics they have to use, etc.
For Obama, “strategy” is more about goals rather than means. He is using it to refer to a larger view – who are our principle enemies / threats, and where are they located? Once those questions have been answered correctly, then it is more up to the military to find the correct means for defeating them.
If what McCain is talking about is strategy, then what Obama is talking about might be called grand strategy. Also, I think McCain has a much more military-centric view of the role of the President as CiC, as if the President was a Napoleonic figure, whereas Obama’s view is more one of the President as the specifically civilian head of the military delegating some of the lower level strategic/tactical decisions to the Sec. of Defense and the JCS.
McCain almost seems to want to be the Chairman of the JCS instead of or in addition to being the POTUS.
My views are I’m sure colored by my being a partisan supporter of Obama, but I think Obama’s view here is better grounded in Amercian history. Our two greatest wartime Presidents were Lincoln and FDR, and they were also the only two since the Revolutionary War to face actual existential threats to the US (as opposed to the potential threat faced by Cold War Presidents via the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union).
In both cases I think you can make a pretty good argument that Lincoln and FDR adhered more to Obama’s vision of the President directing strategy by setting overall goals and priorities and then delegating the implementation of the those to career military officers.
For example, the single most important strategic decision made by FDR during WW2 was to designate the European Axis as the main focus of our efforts and direct most of our resources into that region rather than into the Pacific against Japan. That was a strategic decision in the same sense Obama uses the term when talking about how we took our eyes off the ball in Afghanistan with regard to Bin Laden and AQ, by invading Iraq.
McCain’s description of the Surge in Iraq as a strategy is more closely analogous to the sort of decisions made by Secretary Marshall and the theater commanders in WW2, such as where the D-Day invasion would take place, and how much resources to devote to strategic bombing vs. ground forces, or the decision to reinvent convoy tactics during the Battle of the Atlantic after very high losses were sustained by our side in the early phases of that struggle.
The other area where I think McCain is using bad analogies is with Vietnam. We often hear arguments about whether we could have won in Vietnam as if we should judge that conflict in isolation, ignoring that the Vietnam war was one part of a much longer and larger conflict – the Cold War – which we won despite the setbacks suffered in SE Asia. We lost the battle and won the war, and I think a strong argument can be made that the success we enjoyed in the later stages of the Cold War during the 1980s was made possible by a redeployment of resources which would have been sunk into Vietnam unproductively if that conflict had continued for another decade.
The claims that Ronald Reagan “won the cold war”, even taken at face value, very conveniently ignore the fact that Reagan was able to face the Soviet Union with the luxury of an economy and a military which were not being dragged down by the burden of an expensive and bloody conflict in Vietnam which would have continued into the 1980s if the right wing opponents of “surrender” had been able to have their way on the issue of withdrawl.
The analogies with Iraq and the larger GWOT are so obvious as to be staggering.
So to me the biggest “lesson of Vietnam”, apart from “don’t get sucked into a bad war you can’t win”, is that sometimes you have to lose a battle in order to win the wider conflct which it is merely a part of, if by doing so you are able to more effectively redeploy resources to your advantage which can tip the balance in the larger conflict, and if the conflict in question is global in scope then even a full fledged war (like Vietnam or Iraq today) has to be looked at as a battle only and not the entire conflict.
Which means that stubborn refusual to end any military conflict on any basis other than unambiguous victory, as McCain would have us do, is bad strategy. Obama’s broader strategic view is more relevant than McCain’s narrower one to the wider conflict against terrorism today, and McCain has failed to learn the right lesson from Vietnam because he sees it purely from a military viewpoint and not in its larger Cold War context which a more civilian minded President should be able to do.
Obama’s experience is mostly in Chicago Public Schools…
Just a minor nitpick. The University of Chicago is a private school, not a public school.
Not that not having the details right means that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
The other area where I think McCain is using bad analogies is with Vietnam. We often hear arguments about whether we could have won in Vietnam as if we should judge that conflict in isolation, ignoring that the Vietnam war was one part of a much longer and larger conflict – the Cold War – which we won despite the setbacks suffered in SE Asia. We lost the battle and won the war, and I think a strong argument can be made that the success we enjoyed in the later stages of the Cold War during the 1980s was made possible by a redeployment of resources which would have been sunk into Vietnam unproductively if that conflict had continued for another decade.
I can’t give you all that, TLT.
The critical point in this debate is that McCain thinks that if we do as Westmoreland did and as the Commanders before Petraeus did, we will lose Iraq.
For McCain, the failed strategy is going into hot spots, win a battle, and withdraw. He is hammering Obama because he thinks Obama’s timetable amount to just that.
but it is McCain who doesn’t get it, although he’s getting there, as we can tell because he brings up the spectre of having to return to Iraq.
For Obama, we may damn well have to return to Iraq. and for that matter, we may have to go repeatedly into any space in which a material threat lurks.
Obama is effectively arguing that we should be prepared to do that from now until. And he’s right.
McCain, on the other hand, is locked into this antiquated mindset that if we don’t get the ticker tape parade, we lost.
But there are two major problems with his strategy, even on its own terms: (1) it costs too much and (2) no self-respecting nation will suffer it over the long haul.
What bugs me is that as a nation, we evidently still can’t handle hearing that Irag had changed so significantly–with the mosque bombing, and the Awakening–that the surge walked through an open door.
when that fact sinks in, i.e. that the Iraqi Sunnis turned on AQ, then we can leave, and, if the violence resumes, (1) it’s not AQ or (2) it is AQ and it’s Shi’ite problem.
But we can leave, for now, anyway.
ThatLeftTurn: “So Obama was too passive and did not take the fight to McCain as aggressively as I would have liked, like a tennis player who is always volleying and never serving.”
I suppose Obama’s gentlemanly, patient debating style is how they teach it at Yale and Harvard.
But in the rough-and-tumble of a presidential politics, it seems too reserved and detached and allows a fighter like McCain to get in far too many unchallenged points.
Obama should have pushed McCain on the torture admission, on the spending freeze, on his 90 percent support of the Bush Administration.
Instead, Obama is almost debating as if he is the popular incumbent — which, in a sense, with the Bush Administration so unpopular, he is.
McCain knows this. So he tries to shake up the apple cart as often as possible. It works. But in a time of war and economic disaster, maybe too much so.
One final point before I get ready for work:
Both Obama and McCain were engaging and sharp when the debate turned to foreign affairs.
But what concerned me is both men came off as fairly clueless — almost useless — when Lehrer continually pressed them on the long-term effects of the Bailout Crisis and getting the economy healthy again.
Translation:
For those of us living paycheck to paycheck, neither candidate gave me any sort of reassurance or confidence in them. That’s why I don’t think this debate will move many undecided voters.
Short McCain: More George Bush.
Short Obama: A laundry list of programs we won’t be able to pay for.
“9:15: McCain: his answer goes on about earmarks and pork-barrel spending. I have no idea what this has to do with the present crisis.”
Seriously? I can understand not being up to date on the specific earmarks people are trying to put into the bailout plan, but just on first principles you should be able to figure out that they’re trying it.
I’d say that something they all agree is an emergency can’t be done without payoffs, And Dodd plans a huge one.) demonstrates something about the fundamentally dysfunctional nature of our political class.
Of course, the idea that McCain would actually DO something about that problem is a hoot…
I’m a long way away, here in Australia, and I had to change stations early to watch our national football grand final, but I have to say I was a little disappointed in Obama’s performance. He seemed hesitant, and way too deferential. It seemed a good touch that he kept calling McCain “John” (I didn’t hear a single “Barrack” from the old codger). I was waiting for McCain to lose it, which seemed about to happen a couple of times, but he came across as downright dismissive and arrogant. I don’t know how that plays out with US voters, but we just got rid of our last Prime Minister and his government for exactly that reason. There seem to be so many holes in McCain’s policy platform that Obama could have driven a truck through, but he didn’t. No knockout blows either way. For the sake of the planet, I hope the US polling is accurate, and holds up until November.
On the gloriousness of the surge and its wonderful gloriousity, there is some dispute, though mainly confined to non-politicians and non-pundits and other peons, but anyway, some think that there might be other reasons violence came down. Like ethnic cleansing
I didn’t watch. I can’t stand the stress. Having read what efveryone else has to say about it one thig strikes me: the questions were cnsistantly decent. It wasn’t full of self indulgent media gotchas, the focus was on issues, the moderator didn’t try to make himslef the star.
I how that alll of the debates are like that. Maybe the media learned something frm the debacle of the last Obama/Clintin debate.
“more isolated problems like North Korea, Cuba and Venezeuela.”
I’m sorta wondering exactly why Venezuela is our problem. Cuba, maybe, chiefly because it’s right on our doorstep, plus our commitment to democracy (snicker). Venezuela seems to suffer from having a bunch of rich people on the one hand who never did anything for the poor and a lefty egomaniac currently in charge who equates the cause of the poor with his own power. Not sure why that’s something our government needs to get involved in, aside of course from our commitment to democracy (snicker).
To those who are bothered that Obama didn’t give McCain a hard enough time on torture etc.: please consider the possibility that swing voters may not be excited about the same issues as you. The objective is to build on his lead and this poll suggests that he did what he wanted to do.
TTL’s 11:25PM comment is a good summary of my overall reaction as well.
I just looked at the poll Kevin linked to.
Those results are astonishing to me. It may be that more Democrats watched the debate, so if they just sampled debate-watchers, without any weightings, they got a bad sample.
LeftTurn: “I may be grading on a curve, judging the candidate that I support more harshly.”
I do the same thing.
For a lot of voters, this was probably their first major exposure to Barack Obama, so the fact that he was presidential, reasoned and diplomatic was a nice change of pace to what they’ve seen of George Bush the last eight years.
Bernard: on reflection, I think Ezra gets it right:
Hilzoy: I made mention of this upthread. But it must have been maddening trying to react — yet not overreact — to the debate while liveblogging.
This is what drove me crazy in my past life as a sportswriter: writing and analyzing while a game was going on.
Actually, I was happy to see that my comment about McCain showing outright contempt for Obama was not an overreaction. The pundits on TV went big with that late last night and this morning.
“more isolated problems like North Korea, Cuba and Venezeuela.”
I’m sorta wondering exactly why Venezuela is our problem. Cuba, maybe, chiefly because it’s right on our doorstep, plus our commitment to democracy (snicker). Venezuela seems to suffer from having a bunch of rich people on the one hand who never did anything for the poor and a lefty egomaniac currently in charge who equates the cause of the poor with his own power. Not sure why that’s something our government needs to get involved in, aside of course from our commitment to democracy (snicker).
the short answer is that they’re mavericks. : )
(1) Venezuela is convinced that McCain will engage them militarily, somehow.
so they are signing commitments with the Russians to do a number of unprecedented things in the hemisphere, such as buying huge stocks of weapons, which the McCain is also upset by.
but we learned in the debate that Obama’s FP team is putting Chavez on their agenda too. I hope they understand that Chavez is just worried about McCain. Their is bad blood between those two.
Most recently, the Russians just extended a huge loan to the Venezuelans, a billion or two, to buy more weapons. (Maybe Gary can find it in the NYTimes for you.)
As far as evidence goes, the Colombians found a FARC laptop, which evidently connects Chavez to FARC, so McCain is liable to use it as a pretext, saying We are the ones responsible for the Hemisphere’s security.
You’ve heard it all before: “My fellow citizens, tonight, along with our allies in the region, I’ve authorized a…”
(2) And to the extent that our security depends on Oil, as the Ms of all Ms’s Palin says it does, then note that the other day Venezuela signed a contract with China to supply China with what Venezuela might have sent our “thirsty” markets. As a result of the deal, their oil exports to China will triple over some relatively short time. pretty staggering, actually.
and one other threatening implication is that China, supposedly, will be financing three refineries in the Hemisphere.
Right now, Venezuela has to send its oil to the U.S., Texas, I think, to have it refined for export.
If they can take the U.S. out of the loop altogether, they will have gone a long way toward getting out from the “imperialist yankee.” And then we’re back to that domino theory again, the if-then statements drama-queen McCain loves to rattle off.
Biases be known: I’m against a hostile policy of any kind toward Cuba.
After a night of reflection, I have some thoughts, particularly in terms of whether or not Obama went hard enough at McCain.
Thought one is that I think Obama did better than in any of the denbates against Clinton. There was far less hesitation, erong and ahing. Much smoother, though still not as much as I would like him to be.
Secondly, I actually think Obama handled the surge questions well. He didn’t try to argue that the surge wasn’t a success, aminly because I think that would be viewed by a lot of the nation as naive because most people adctually think it has been. But he made very clear that it was only a tactic used as part of a greater strategy which has not been accomplished yet. And he was right on the tactic/strategy issue whereas McCain was wrong.
Thirdly, this was really a trial balloon type of debate for Obama. The key for him was to come off as in control of himself, not getting rattled and not making any major gaffes. In that he was successful.
McCain may feel he did well, and in some respects he did, but he had to make major positive movement and he didn’t. In the area where he was supposed to wipe the floor with Obama, he din’t.
An his constant and repetitive “He doesn’t understand” basically was thrown back at him, because each time he did so, Obama showed that in many respects he had an even better understanding than McCain.
Conclusion, basically a draw which then becomes a win for Obama. The town hall will be the next one, and Obama does well in those type of settings as does McCain. The last debate, I think, is where Obama will come prepared to show just how little McCain really understands the economy. But by then his lead will be way up there and it will be the final last gasp of the McCain campaign.
Did any of the networks talk to Palin?
Two words: undisclosed location.
I felt like we saw the conservative/centrist side of Obama tonight, not a progressive Obama.
To be honest, I think that *is* Obama. IMO he’s not, in fact, all that progressive.
I think what you see is not “triangulation”, it’s who he is.
I don’t really have a problem with that, I think it means it’s that much more likely that he’ll be able to get stuff done if he’s elected.
Debate comments:
I thought it was a good debate. There were no bonehead questions, no talk about flag pins or who is more “likeable”. Most of what we heard from the candidates was more or less on point. You got a decent idea of what each of them was about, and what we might expect if they were elected.
Obama’s not a tremendously polished debater, but I thought he did fine. Most of all, he didn’t let McCain get under his skin, but he also didn’t take crap from McCain, and I think both of those things will serve him well with folks who are on the fence.
I look forward to the next one.
Thanks –
Regarding American exceptionalism.
And conservative verdicts on Palin.
“Seriously? I can understand not being up to date on the specific earmarks people are trying to put into the bailout plan, but just on first principles you should be able to figure out that they’re trying it.”
Seriously, what the heck do earmarks have to do with the collapse of the banking/mortgage system?
This is like responding to the imminent failure of the electrical system in your house by saying you need to put some mosquito repellent on yourself. It might be nice to get rid of the mosquitos, but how will it help you keep your electric power going?
“Having read what efveryone else has to say about it one thig strikes me: the questions were cnsistantly decent.”
Of course they were; it was Jim Lehrer.