Debate one.
Foreign policy was supposed to be McCain’s strength. Obama held his own. Most commentators say ‘draw.’ I say, on a night where the advantage should have been significantly McCain, maintaining parity chalks as an Obama win.
I was disappointed in both responses to Georgia/Russia. McCain mentioned the Caspian pipeline, and I give him major points for that, but he didn’t dare connect the dots because it was a Clinton initiative. Obama had a wide-open shot, and never took it. It’s a debate. Lunge and finish ‘em off.
Speaking observations:
Obama doesn’t fear the intra-sentence pause, he knows how to use it for effect. He seems to fear pre-sentence pauses, though. He needs to eliminate the sliced-up phonetics as he forms his ideas before he speaks on each individual idea. Excellent hand gestures, though. Just right.
McCain needs to stop telling long-winded stories. If he said he’d been to Versailles in 1919 ... hell, I’d believe him. He sounds like a grandfather getting huffy over the behavior of the grandkids: “Dammit, you whippersnappers, you’re going to listen to my story and learn something useful ...” I sometimes thought I could hear snores.
McCain was trying to sell experience tonight, yet he threw experience in the bonfire to legitimize Mrs Palin [legitimacy that is beginning to crumble at the foundations].
I wonder who will buy tonight’s discounted experience? After the post-RNC fire sale, it’s not supposed to be worth much. About equal to those real estate investments on Wall Street.
Later: Fact-checking the debate. Nothing to fear on the Democratic side.
Even later: While digging through the initial reactions on the Right side of the aisle (and they seem to agree draw, or slight win for Obama), I observe some right-wingers calling Obama a ‘stupid studdering moron’ [sic]. Another sad (and cruel) misperception. First off, Obama’s verbal tics are not a stutter ... it’s having too much to say, and not being able to parse the bounty into a sentence. We all do it. Second of all, stutterers have, on average, higher IQ’s than the general populace. You’d want a stutterer for President, if wits count for anything at all in politics these days.
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