Despite all of the endless pondering over this past week on whether or not it would happen, John McCain and Barack Obama did have their first presidential debate last night at the University of Mississippi. A number of folks commented on the Open Thread that I posted last night (and I'd recommend that whoever takes the blog over during the next few weeks might consider posting open threads during those debates too), but now that I've had the chance to see the debate, time for my opinions.
Thoughts that have nothing to do with the topics debated whatsoever
The Commission on Public Debates announced that there would be a number of changes in the format this year. Instead of asking questions and having each candidate have a certain amount of time to make comments and going back and forth, the format was a lot looser this year. Each "question" was supposed to have nine minutes to be discussed: first each candidate would address the question for two minutes each, and then they would have like five minutes of a "free-for-all" on the question where they could speak and ask each other questions and all that. Guess what? That didn't happen. Jim Lehrer spent the first two questions trying to get them to talk back and forth to each other, but they wouldn't do it and just ended up making their general speeches back and forth without any real physical time constraints. Often they talked over each other, and every question went much longer than it should have. Lehrer eventually gave up on the idea and just let them talk back and forth on the issues. I don't know if the folks in charge of organizing the framework for these debates were trying to make it more like the 2006 debates on The West Wing or something, but it didn't work out. Sorry, but the writers for John McCain and Barack Obama are not as clever as the writers for The West Wing.
I don't know how many people noticed, but in a funny twist, Barack Obama wore an American flag pin, and John McCain didn't. Take that, Nash McCabe of Latrobe, PA who questioned Obama's belief in the American flag during the ABC Democratic Presidential Debate in Philadelphia on April 16, 2008! Although in McCain's defense, his tie was out of this world.
Didn't it also seem kind of strange that McCain didn't turn and look at Barack Obama at all? He always seemed to face in the same direction, and he always referred to Obama as "Senator Obama." Obama, on the other hand, routinely looked at McCain during the debate, and often referred to him informally as "John." It just feels slightly hostile below the surface.
And Now a Look at What Really Matters (or so we'd hope)
Lehrer started out the debate with some questions on the current financial crisis. The responses here were kind of disappointing. After all, the financial crisis is still in its infancy, and so it's very hard for these two to know how the country's economy will look on January 20th or what will be needed to respond to it then. As for asking how the crisis will affect their goals and programs, I think that they made it clear to Jim Lehrer that they can't tell at this point how the financial crisis will affect their budgets in 2009, but Lehrer just wouldn't admit that his question was unanswerable. Quite frankly, I felt that the portion of the debate on the financial crisis was quite disappointing and did not give us any new answers about the issues at hand.
Having declared that the answers to his questions were taking much longer than was planned, he moved on to asking the candidates on different regions of the world, since the debate was supposed to be about national security, after all. First he asked about what "the lessons of Iraq" are, then about Afghanistan and if it needed more troops, then the threat from Iran, then about our relationship with Russia, and finally--and I really found this question odd--on the question of the likeliness of another 9/11 attack, and the candidates pretty much fell into their usual camps.
The debate didn't seem to have very much drama or reveal very much about the candidates that we didn't already know. They didn't get into really major disagreements, only talked over each other a few times, and I don't think that it was very clear that one candidate or the other took the lead (although the polls now show that a slight majority saw Obama as the "winner" of the debate). Quite frankly, at the current time, I think that what most of the country is concerned about is issues that are affecting us here at home, like the economy, education, health care, etc. As important as issues of national security and foreign policy are, I just don't think that they're on the top of everyone's radar screen right now, and that's probably why this debate felt as underwhelming as it did.
I think that the really interesting debate will be the Vice Presidential debate on Thursday. If you thought that McCain and Obama were contrasting figures, that's nothing compared to the number of differences between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. Not only do those two have very different backgrounds and levels of experience, but we also haven't been hearing as much about them for the last, say, 18 months as we have about Obama and McCain.
And of course, be sure to check out the Open Thread for some debate coverage that is probably more insightful than mine is.
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