I listened to the debate on the radio while driving my bicycle home (external speaker, no headphones-too dangerous). Obama doesn’t have a very good radio voice when compared with John McCain’s. McCain’s voice made me think he should read children’s audiobooks.
When I got home and watched television, McCain seemed really cold, except when he was angry. I didn’t see much emotion. Obama seemed warm and welcoming, but with him also, not much other emotion. He seemed to have the better body language, though.
McCain seemed really weak on the economy, like he just didn’t get it. Obama seemed to get it, but didn’t give me as much confidence as I would have liked for him to actually be able to do something about it.
What really surprised me was that McCain seemed weaker on foreign policy than Obama.
I thought about that for a bit and realized that McCain’s version of dealing with other countries would have worked well 40 years ago, but not today. The world is too tightly interconnected economically and socially now to give the cold shoulder as a strategic tactic any legs. Obama’s willing to talk to leaders without preconditions seems to fit better in this 21st century.
Obama just never seemed to get really angry like McCain did. That’s going to be seen by some undecideds as a weakness. I personally don’t think it is.
There just wasn’t much nuance from either of them, which is . For a 90 minute debate where I didn’t see any water glasses or bottles or break of any kind, they both did really well.
I also like that the camera angles made them look about the same physically. McCain was a fighter pilot so he’s a smaller man. Things like that shouldn’t matter in picking our leaders, but they often do. They way they were framed by the camera made them equal, and I thought that was more than fair.
Good questions by Jim Lehrer, but I really wish the public could have had some input. Health care mortgages and jobs tend to crowd out most other people’s issues when they hit close to home (or no home, as the case may be). They just didnt’ talk about those enough for my taste. But it was supposed to be about foreign policies and not domestic issues.
After viewing some of the twitter 2008 election feed, I realized why they didn’t, because it seemed so many people were trying to game the system there, they were probably worried that would have happened with the formation of the questions.
For a debate on foreign policy I kept thinking, ‘What about South America? Russia landed 2 planes in Venezuela. China has huge connections there.’
Cainmark's Cave Scratchings 