Last Night’s Debate. Meh.

~ Laura

The geeks were on twitter last night in full force with iPads in hand ready at a moment's notice to craft snark in 140 characters. The geeks were disappointed. 

Obama's performance, while not quite as disastrous as conservatives claim, was certainly lackluster. He kept looking down at the podium to write notes, but the effect was that he looked like a shamed school boy. 

Romney did well, only because he didn't stink. We expected stink, and we got adequate. 

Neither candidate showed oratory brilliance. Neither showed the brilliance of a particular policy plan.

The debate could be summed up as:

"Your plan with do this."

"No it won't."

"Yes it will."

"Shut up! No, it won't."  

Both candidates claimed that he was the champion of the middle class, senior citizens, and small business owners, while the other guy would impoverish them. Neither was very convincing. 

Some twitter geeks, like Andrew Sullivan, said that Obama lost the election last night. He didn't. Nobody changed their vote last night, because of that debate. Not one voter. If Romney won last night, it was more because of style issues, rather than content, which won't wiggle the poll numbers in the slightest. 

Published by Laura

11 thoughts on “Last Night’s Debate. Meh.”

  1. “Nobody changed their vote last night, because of that debate. Not one voter.”
    That’s the whole point, to take away from last night. It did not matter if Romney or Obama “won” because nothing either said last night was going to change the mind of anyone.

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  2. Thank you, Laura. I listened on the radio and thought Obama did well, although I wished he would have rebutted some of Romney’s fact-challenged statements more strongly, or at all.

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  3. I thought Jim Lehrer should have stepped in more, and in fact what I’d really like to see is aggressive, in-depth, one-on-one interviews with journalists who challenge them on their facts and make them give specifics. Otherwise it’s just a series of mini stump speeches without the cheering in the background. (Romney would have suffered a lot more from this, in my view, but I’d have been happy to hear more from Obama too.)
    Maybe we can get a British journalist to do it; they don’t seem to be timid about challenging their political leaders.

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  4. I polled my students.of the approximately 50 who watched (out of ~60), two said their vote changed because of last night. Didn’t ask, but i assume towards Romney. Not a lot, but not none. Then again, there are two debates left, so maybe they’ll change back.

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  5. Did they have to watch? I’m somewhat surprised that 50/60 students watched the debate. I thought it would only be political junkies like Laura.

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  8. “Did Romney really say he’d turn out Big Bird. I always thought that was a liberal activist urban legend.”
    Big Bird is big business. I just did a search at amazon.com, and there are 33,000+ entries for just “big bird.” Elmo scores 19,000 entries on amazon.com.

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  10. Obama came to Madison yesterday and apparently, he was just saving all his energy and enthusiasm for that speech. Friends who went to the rally said he was great. Me, I thought he just looked really, really tired. Kinda the way I do on a Wednesday night of a busy week…and I’m not even trying to rule the world.

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  11. The polls in my state (VA) seem to have switched from slight O lead to slight R lead. So, something seems to have happened.
    I watched some of it (with my Number 1, who has an American Government class assignment) and it didn’t look to me like any kind of a blowout for either of them. But the next day, the Dems were despairing, so I missed something.

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