Now that's a debate!

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - 3:22 PM

Ther general consensus is that the presidential debates have sucked eggs. Of course, this leads to an interesting question: what would a good debate look like? Ladies and gentleman, I give you Eric Alterman and Christopher Hitchens debating Iraq on bloggingheads.tv. Bear in mind, these two are actually going to vote for the same guy in November -- but it doesn't affect their clash on Iraq:

Do out the whole diavlog.

COMMENTS (8)

EXPLORE:CULTURE, POLITICS, BLOGGINGHEADS, DEBATE

Open town hall thread

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Tuesday, October 7, 2008 - 11:02 PM

I'm not planning on live-blogging the debate tonight -- but feel free to comment away! [That's it??!!--ed. I already said everything I wanted to about the campaign today. But I would be remiss if I did not link to George Packer's New Yorker essay today on the undecideds in Ohio and West Virginia. Fascinating stuff, and exceptionally well-written.] UPDATE: Alex Massie is a stitch to read on the debate. ANOTHER UPDATE: Josh Marshall: "This debate's so boring I don't even know what to tell the staff to upload to youtube." Ordinarily I would take this as a sign that McCain is winning, but I think the format is killing him. Visually, he looks hunched over and old compared to Obama. Also, referencing Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil is not the way to seem like the man of the future. LAST UPDATE: Thank God that's over... I've seen enough of these to know their lines by heart. Props to both candidates, however, for not bringing up idiotic diversions like Bill Ayres or Charles Keating. With little new in the responses, I suspect Obama will win in the instapolls, because the non-verbal components of the debate favored him so much. NRO's Michael Graham blogs:

It wasn't a debate — there was no "debating." It wasn't a town hall — the people didn't speak. It wasn't an interview — there were virtually no follow-ups. It wasn't a contest of ideas. The two "contestants" shared most of the same ideas. This was a lost 90 minutes out of my life, and a huge, irreplaceable, lost opportunity for the McCain campaign.

The Fox News contributors are giving it to Obama. William Kristol is calling the McCain campaign "chaotic."

COMMENTS (19)

EXPLORE:POLITICS, DEBATE

What was missing from last night's debate? Anyone? Bueller?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Saturday, September 27, 2008 - 3:44 PM

As I was puttering around this morning, there was something gnawing me about the debate last night. None of the surface stuff -- there was something amiss that I couldn't place. And then, going over the debate transcript, I realized it:

Jim Lehrer didn't ask a single question about China.

Think about this for a second. China is clearly the one country that can challenge the United States as a peer competitor in the next decade. There are economic, regional, security, human rights, and global governance issues where Washington and Beijing don't see eye to eye. And there was no question that addressed any of this. That is a whopper of an omission for a debate about foreign policy. Question to readers: what other foreign policy issues were not even discussed at last night's debate?

COMMENTS (37)

EXPLORE:POLITICS, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, CHINA, DEBATE

Um, I'm going to do, like, some really shallow debate analysis, like, OK?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Saturday, September 27, 2008 - 12:54 PM

Nate Silver points out, correctly, that pundits watch these debates differently than the rest of the country. So, as a follow-up to last night's post, which focused more on the substance of what they said, here are some random thoughts about the surface stuff:

John McCain looks much worse in person than he does on analog television, and I was wondering if that would show up if 2008 would lead to an HD/analog split in reaction to the debate that 1960 had for radio/television. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the answer was no. [Pleasantly?--ed. Yes, this is a really stupid reason to prefer one candidate over the other.] McCain looked better than expected, while Obama looked more sallow. Curiously, the more whiskey I drank, the better both of them looked. UPDATE: Wow, Ann Althouse and I agree!
Ah, the perceived slights. Josh Marshall highlights McCain's unwillingness to make eye contact with Obama. I would say that McCain evinced some disregard for Obama -- but I'm not buying the "low-ranking monkey" hypothesis (seriously, I can't believe Josh posted this). McCain was not afraid of Obama -- he just doesn't like him.
Meanwhile, Amy Holmes at NRO is miffed that Obama kept calling John McCain "John" rather than Senator McCain. Holmes suggests that Obama picked this up from Joe Biden. I've found, in talking with Obama staffers, that this is just how that campaign talks. They all call Obama "Barack". The fuddy-duddy in me finds this absurd -- if you're worried about a stature/experience gap with your opponent, the last thing you do is call everyone by their first name. But it's not something directed at McCain specifically.
The most grating moment came when John McCain called himself a maverick. As Megan McArdle observes, "no one should ever, ever refer to themselves as a maverick unless they are currently James Garner."
Amid all the debate over who won the debate, the answer seems clear to me -- the candidate who left themselves more vulnerable to the cold-open Saturday Night Live skit tonight loses. I think McCain's performance is more ripe for satire -- but we'll know in about 14 hours.