I've only seen Barack Obama in small clips, so the recent round three was my first opportunity to actually watch him in action as well as a straight comparison with his opposite number John McCain. To be honest I think Obama's native intelligence has been understated by the press - it was abundantly clear that he's a much, much smarter cookie than I'd been led to believe - while the press has overstated the policy agenda of John McCain's campaign. McCain looked like a insubstantial retard next to Obama.Throughout the debate it seemed pretty obvious that McCain's mantra was still the Republican chestnut of smaller government and tax cuts and rebate to the rich sort of stuff at best, which is disappointing because it shows he has very little awareness that that line of reasoning led to the current financial crisis. If anything was obvious as daylight was the fact that if one voted for a McCain presidency, it really was going to be more of the same, in spite of his insistence that he's not George W. Bush.
Obama has been criticised for some time now as having very little policy specifics, just blankly offering change without a concrete policy platform. This characterisation was simply wrong. The man is full of concrete plans that he can't say enough about without the moderator cutting him off in mid-flight. If the debate was anything to go by, Obama seems to have more of a plan than McCain.
McCain spent his equivalent time essentially attacking Obama for being liberal, or for having friends who used to be radicals or having voted for a Pro-Choice bill while being a Illinois state politician. I have to say this was a boring tactic by McCain. Frankly, I'm not interested in 'Roe versus Wade' as a issue at all or whether a judge would overturn it or not. While McCain railed against the ideological framework for picking judges, he sure was happy to roll in the ideological claptrap of abortion as an issue.
It's a non-issue. The only reason it can be made into something that resembles an issue is because there are enough stupid people who insist that it should be an issue. Bottom line, I don't really care if some trailer-park trash teenage girl gets impregnated by some trailer-trash boy, and is wondering if she should have the right to terminate the pregnancy or not. It's just not a pressing issue on my horizon. I'm sorry if it sounds callous, but it's just not an issue.
The pressing issues for the USA is going to be how it gets through the current economic mess caused by the lack of oversight that was sanctioned by the current Bush administration; the two wars being left as the legacy of this same Bush administration, and how to actually take a step towards a greener energy-economy which hs been resisted by the Bush administration.
It is clear that John McCain is coming too late in history. The part of history where the very arguments that McCain was trying to mount held any weight, was consigned to the dustbin 12months ago when the credit crunch came in to dismantle the extensive debt structures America and the rest of the first world had built up. This is no time to be insisting on small government and more tax cuts for the rich. In that sense the debate illustrated just how out of touch, out-moded and out of luck McCain was as a candidate. It's simply not going to matter what he says. The time for his kind of politics has passed.
The Idiots In Middle America
It's sad but true that one of the most anti-intellectual things going around is Hollywood tailoring its product so idiots in Middle America can 'get it'.
There's something about the Presidential debate that is operating on the same level. As I noted before, the metaphorical 800lb gorilla in the room is the financial crisis which is going to turn into the looming recession. Yet, the debate's format itself wants to tackle such moronic issues appointment of judges who might overturn 'Roe versus Wade' or the effect of negative campaigning or whether the oil import proportions can be cut, or whether the education voucher model in Washington DC could be mounted Federally. I don't think too many people would have been wiser about just how much the candidates are actually trying to have a plan that deals with the metaphorical 'gorilla in the room'.
I saw the dissection on Fox afterwards and the pundits were happy to talk about negative campaigns and the abortion issue, with the woman from Fortune Magazine trying to characterise Obama as a 'liberal' and therefore something bad. They went to a bunch of scruffy looking swinging voters who then said a bunch of incredibly idiotic things like "I'm voting for a President, not a debater." Dude, stay at home if you're not interested in the debate! Don't waste our time with how inadequate your mind is in digesting what just took place.
Another nork sumgly said "I think what Obama' saying is right, but I still won't vote for him."
That's not a swinging voter, Fox television! That's a racist prick who has no rational argument but simply can't abide a black man.
I don't know why I get irritated by this, because it's Fox. But it is so stupid. You sort of wonder if people really are going to take pointers from that moronic cast of imbeciles.
They say a country elects a government it deserves - and perhaps 8 years of George W. Bush cements all the negative connotations of that expression. Nothing depressed me more than just how dumbed down the actual coverage was, in the light of the actual debate.
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