Debates

I think one of the most telling moments of last night was when Obama said the "fine" for small businesses not insuring their employees would be zero. McCain made one of his goofy faces that he did so much throughout the night.

Who won?

CBS: Obama 53% McCain 22%
CNN: Obama:58% McCain 31%

These are polls of undecided voters. McCain needed a game changer tonight and I think he got it. Unfortunately for him it wasn't in the right direction. He helped make up the minds of more uncommitted and we should expect to see more polls reflect the CBS/NYTimes poll in the coming days.

Gallup has Obama winning Tuesday's debate 56%-23%. That's a huge margin. I wonder what McCain will try at the next debate.

Wow did McCain bomb tonight. Holy shit! HuffPo has the rundown of the news networks, who all gave it to Obama (even FOX). Instead of spending time writing out my words on this, I am going to let Andrew Sullivan speak for me:

This was, I think, a mauling: a devastating and possibly electorally fatal debate for McCain. Even on Russia, he sounded a little out of it. I've watched a lot of debates and participated in many. I love debate and was trained as a boy in the British system to be a debater. I debated dozens of times at Oxofrd. All I can say is that, simply on terms of substance, clarity, empathy, style and authority, this has not just been an Obama victory. It has been a wipe-out.It has been about as big a wipe-out as I can remember in a presidential debate. It reminds me of the 1992 Clinton-Perot-Bush debate. I don't really see how the McCain campaign survives this.

I feel the exact same way. It seems as though many on the right are echoing those thoughts tonight. Markos has a great rundown of other conservatives who weren't impressed at all.

Another thing - should McCain thank Obama? Remember when McCain wanted to do all these town halls with Obama? Well we see what that may have looked like. Of course McCain maybe thought he needed practice before the big one tonight, which speaks badly in itself that a seasoned politician like McCain would need practice against the "inexperienced" Obama.

The answer is simple - no followups. This was something the McCain campaign pushed to get changed. Gwen Ifill was not allowed to ask any followups to any questions. This gave Palin an excuse to dodge questions, which she did really well. So while the pundits are trying to spin this as being some "great performance", it wasn't. It was like moving the outfield wall in by a couple hundred feet and then calling someone the home run king.

We will still remember her as this:

Kurtz is definitely not part of the "liberal media", yet he isn't buying the crap that Ifill will be biased towards Biden/Obama tomorrow night:

You read that right - McCain's campaign is saying they didn't have any idea that this book was coming. The problem is that there were AP articles talking about this book weeks before McCain's campaign agreed to the debate and Ifill as the moderator. So if they didn't know, it looks like the McCain campaign just didn't do their homework.

I turned on Morning Joe and heard him going off about Gwen Ifill moderating the debate tomorrow night. His complaint is that she has authored a book; The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama . I hadn't heard about this book, so I started Googleing it. One of the first links I found was from none other than the National Review by none other than Malkin:

My dictionary defines “moderator” as “the nonpartisan presiding officer of a town meeting.” On Thursday, PBS anchor Gwen Ifill will serve as moderator for the first and only vice presidential debate. The stakes are high. The Commission on Presidential Debates, with the assent of the two campaigns, decided not to impose any guidelines on her duties or questions.

But there is nothing “moderate” about where Ifill stands on Barack Obama. She’s so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out.

And how does Malkin know exactly what is in Ifill's book when it won't be released until the very day our new President takes office, January 20, 2009? Reading the editorial review, it just says she is talking about the breakthrough of African-Americans in politics. Nothing about it being specifically about Obama.

So could this become the reason the McCain campaign does a last minute pull out of the debate? I Wouldn't be shocked if that's the case. If that's the case then how about Tom Brokaw, who has been acting as a "liaison" between the McCain campaign and NBC?

His [Brokaw's] mission, he said, was to assure the candidate's aides that -- despite some negative on-air commentary by Mr. Olbermann in particular -- Mr. McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News. Mr. Brokaw said he had been told by a senior McCain aide, whom he did not name, that the campaign had been reluctant to accept an NBC representative as one of the moderators of the three presidential debates -- until his name was invoked.

"One of the things I was told by this person was that they were so irritated, they said, 'If it's an NBC moderator, for any of these debates, we won't go,' " Mr. Brokaw said. "My name came up, and they said, 'Oh, hell, we have to do it, because it's going to be Brokaw.' "

Here's the problem. Both candidates agreed to these moderators. Olbermann and Matthews' bias towards Obama or the Democrats is not newly found. It has been obvious before these campaigns even started. So then why didn't the McCain campaign say, "hold it right there - these moderators are too biased"? The answer is simple. Because when they agreed to these debates, McCain's campaign wasn't in self-destruction mode.

McCain has destroyed his chances at becoming President and he has now echoed his inner Hillary with a constant attack on the "liberal media". The problem is it's not working. The media was in bed with the McCain campaign for so long and people know it. Now that McCain has become so bad that they had no option but to start reporting the truth, McCain is out to blame them. This really echoes the similarities between George Bush and John McCain, two people both unable to admit their own problems. That is more of the same.

The McCain campaign is threatening Gwen Ifill if she asks to many/hard foreign policy questions Thursday night:

Of course the moron Steve Doocey now says people are more concerned about "domestic issues". Funny that when they talk about John McCain they say the voters are more concerned about foreign policy.

So this should be chalked up as another example that McCain would put our nation in danger just to win an election. This man is a disgrace.

And look who caught it also:

Yup - that's what the wingnuts are saying. John McCain says "horseshit" not once, but twice, during a nationally televised debate and the crowd who screams and yells every time a word slips out on a liberal blog, calls this being a maverick. Unfuckingbelievable. Let me give you a glimpse of how the wingnut blogs would read if the tables were reversed and Obama had said this:

Michelle Malkin: The one shows his ghetto lifestyle by polluting the ears of my children, who were trying to get an education in presidential politics, by saying this word I can not repeat here. He said it not once, but twice.

Allahpundit: Obamessiah lets his potty mouth fly, showing he is clearly not ready to lead this nation.

Bill O'Reilly: This is totally unacceptable and I am calling on the FCC to investigate Senator Obama and leverage all fines against his campaign. Children around the country having their first experience in presidential debates should not have been subjected to such profanity and the Factor will hold Mr. Obama accountable for his horrible actions.

Do you got any fake reactions from the right if Obama said this? Please add them in the comments.

And this focus group of undecided voters, split evenly on which way they voted in 2004, overwhelmingly said Obama moved them the most last night:

This jives with all the polls that came out last night, showing Obama as the winner. The pundits are pretty much split on it, but their opinions don't really much matter since they are part of the barbecue media.