The Debate

I watched last night's debate and I've been digesting the reaction to it all day, via the news sites and blogs I frequent. A few of my own impressions:

1) McCain is a much better debater than he is speechmaker. I was impressed by his breadth of knowledge, at least about international relations and general world history. I thought his rantings about earmarks were laughable, given their relative insiginifance in the larger scheme of things.

2) While McCain's knowledge of the world is impressive, I thought that Obama did not give much ground to him on foreign policy and the Iraq War. I remain impressed that Obama was one of the few prescient ones in 2003 whose first inclination was to question whether Iraq was really a place we needed or wanted to invade.

3) I grew tired of McCain's obvious disdain for Obama. He did not, even once, look him in the face. Not once. He seemed patronizing and contempuous. Obama stayed respectful, as he always does.

4) I was watching the debate on CNN and they have this neat little tracker on the bottom of the screen that gauges audience reaction in real-time. You get to watch the reaction of 35 people to every moment in the debate. When they like something they turn the dial up, and when they don't like what they hear, they turn the dial down. They were evenly splite among Democrates, Republicans, and Independents, and you could watch how each separate group reacted. Anyway, the most intresting thing I noticed was that when one of the candidates went blatantly negative, all trend lines would immediately go down. McCain was far more negative (or, as those sympathetic to him might say, "aggressive") than Obama. Whenever he got snide, the audience generally reacted negatively.

5) I don't think anyone who has already made their mind up will change their minds as a result of the debate. The two basically repeated things they've already said before. However, their body language, their basic demeanor, and their temperaments were on display. Obama was calm and collected. McCain was annoyed and dismissive, as if to say, "how do you even share this stage with me?" Clinton did that too.

She lost.

6) Palin (and McCain) better hope that she does better with Joe Biden than she did with Katie Couric.

7) In the end, people generally see what they want to see in these kinds of things. I'm no exception.