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.

Vice-Presidential debate review: Biden v. Ryan at Danville, Ky.

Friday afternoon (Australian Eastern Summer Time), the vice-presidential debate between incumbent Joe Biden (D-Del.) and challenger Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) was held in the middle of nowhere, a.k.a. Center College in Danville, Kentucky. Biden was hoping to halt the Romney-Ryan ticket’s momentum after the Republican ticket’s uptick in the polls since the first debate, while Ryan needed to demonstrate that he was ready for the big time. In some measure, both probably achieved their goals, and both sides are desperately trying to spin it to make it look as if they won.

1) Biden was constantly frustrated by what he saw as Ryan’s dissembling and evasiveness. On occasions, he was amusing in his ribbing of his opponent; at other times, he brought back memories of Al Gore’s sighs against George W. Bush in 2000. He also had moments of extreme frustration, where he would talk down to the moderator and demand that he be given equal time (in fact, he spoke for longer than Ryan in total). How he is perceived to have performed will be determined by whichever one of these modes the media portray him in.

2) Ryan came across as knowledgeable and personable when talking about domestic policy, but his foreign policy talking points sounded as if they were taken verbatim from neocon propaganda (eg. the ‘reset’ with Russia not working, Obama going on an ‘apology tour’). Oddly, when asked about when he believed the U.S. should intervene in a foreign country, he gave a rather Kissingerian answer, that is, that it should do so only when doing so would be in its national interest. He also has a bit of a tendency to disguise his lack of foreign policy knowledge by name-dropping generals he’s met or places in Afghanistan he’s visited.

3) The second-last segment of the nine was a weird one. The moderator said something to the effect of: ‘you’re both Catholics. Whaddya reckon about abortion?’ Not sure what the point of this was, other than to make Ryan look the better Catholic for adhering to the Church’s position on abortion, or to provide the media with more talking points about ‘TEH GENDER GAP!!!11!’ Speaking of which, it wasn’t as pronounced in this debate as the last one – Biden spent at least half of his talking time more favoured by men than by women, and the two ‘worms’ converged more than they did last week.

4) There wasn’t much in the debate that will serve as a ‘game-changer’. The most exciting part was when Ryan compared his tax plan to John F. Kennedy’s tax cut/stimulus, causing Biden to ask “Oh, so you’re Jack Kennedy now?” For a second I thought Biden was going to do a Lloyd Bentsen on him, but it wasn’t to be.

Presidential debate review: Obama v. Romney at Denver

Thursday morning (Australian Eastern Standard Time), Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) went mano a mano in the first of three presidential debates, held at the University of Denver’s Magness Arena. My thoughts:

1) Obama sometimes stumbled with his words and looked ordinary, but he did much better in split-screen mode than Romney. When Romney is speaking, Obama looks down respectfully, whereas when Obama speaks, Romney gives him a slightly contemptuous look. But I agree with most commentators, who say that Romney was the winner on the basis that he exceeded expectations.

2) The gender gap was very noticeable on CNN’s ‘worm’ graphic; I don’t think I saw Romney leading among women or Obama leading among men for the entire (one-and-a-half-hour) debate. This fits into the whole ‘Republican War on Women’ narrative that the Democrats have been using this year.

3) What a pair of un-ideological technocrats the candidates are! ‘An independent study says my economic policies will reduce the budget deficit’. ‘I’ve got another independent study that says your independent study is wrong’. Whatever happened to this ideological rancour that the Very Serious People say is paralysing Washington?

4) The debate won’t be any sort of ‘game changer’ that wins the election for one of the candidates – it probably won’t shift the polls more than one percentage point either way. Romney’s slipperiness regarding which tax loopholes he plans to abolish to help balance the budget, however, is something which could spiral out of control for him. Without providing something resembling a detailed answer, the Obama campaign could keep hitting him and make him look evasive.