Presidential debate review: Obama v. Romney at Hempstead, N.Y.

Hempstead, a town in eastern Long Island which is home to the New York Islanders, hosted the second presidential debate on Wednesday afternoon (AEST) at Hofstra University, using the ‘town hall’ format. I dread these events – the format is designed to produce mushy, pandering sentiments from candidates, who are forced to nod their heads and look sympathetic while some random tells them their life story and asks them some soft-ball question. The 1992 town hall debate, in which Bill Clinton told an audience member: “I feel your pain”, marked one of the low points in the Oprah-fication of American politics. Obama and Romney continued the sordid history, but also provided some entertaining policy arguments, styles of walking around the room, and mispronunciations of voters’ names.

1) Obama and Biden have spent more time talking than Romney and Ryan in all three debates so far. Somewhere, some right-wing blog will use this to claim that ‘omg teh lamestream mediaz is librulz!!!11!’ But seriously, one wonders whether the moderators take note of this and allow Romney to use more time in the third debate.

2) Moneybags Mitt likes him some black gold. He wants to drill for it on federal land, he wants to pipe it down from Soviet Canuckistan, and he wants lots of tax credits for Big Oil. He claims that the Obama administration hasn’t drilled enough oil on federal land, and gets rather stroppy when Obama disputes those claims. This issue seems to get Mittens fired up more than anything else.

3) Here’s three Romney lines from the debate: “I was a missionary for my church”; “I was a pastor for my congregation”; and “I went over there to help them with the Olympics” (‘there’ being Salt Lake City). He goes to a lot of trouble to avoid mentioning the M-word; not only in the context of religious matters, but on at least two occasions he buttressed his business credentials by referencing his work on the ‘Olympics’ without mentioning whether they were the summer or winter Games, and WHAT CITY THEY WERE HELD IN. Also not mentioned are the country he missionary’d in (France) and the nature of his position in the Mormon church (the freaking equivalent of a freaking archbishop).

4) One thing Mittens doesn’t have trouble with is launching into discussions of things that largely remain inside the conservative bubble. Over the two debates, he’s mentioned Solyndra, the Keystone Pipeline, the Fast and the Furious, the ‘Apology Tour’, the ‘reset’ with Russia not working, and the Benghazi embassy attack as result of anti-YouTube video protest thesis. All have been met with the worm flatlining as low-information undecided voters emit a collective ‘WTF?’

5) The Great Gender Gap of 2012 didn’t quite manifest itself as clearly. The ‘worm’ (actually the collected spontaneous opinions of thirty-five Ohioan undecideds in a room with the lovely Erin Burnett) didn’t diverge as it did in the first debate, and indeed the female ‘worm’ was hidden behind the male one for much of the night. When Obama waffled on about the finer details of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, it flatlined like a West Coast Eagles player on Mad Monday. None of this, of course, will stop the establishment media from continuing it’s anointing of middle-class suburban white women as the Official Swing Demographic of 2012.

6) There were some more weird questions. ‘Governor Romney, how are you different from George W. Bush?’ ‘What’s your position on assault weapons?’ ‘President Obama, why should I vote for you again this time?’ And some forgetting of names: “Lorraine… Lorena… is it Lorena?... hi, Lorena… no, it’s Lorraine… hi, Lorraine.” Apparently, Obama was the winner (it’s hard to tell with these things), and this should stem the Romney ‘bounce’ in the polls.