Liliana Segura says:
The first problem with this debate was calling it a debate. The second was calling it a "town hall." In the strange, stilted ritual atop the red carpet at Nashville's Belmont University, the studio audience looked less like an inquisitive cross-section of the American public than it did a cast of apolitical drones programmed to deliver canned questions in exchange for canned lines. This was mostly thanks to the rules. The two candidates were literally, according to guidelines agreed upon by the two campaigns, prohibited from addressing each other directly. The result was an hour and a half of parallel speechifying in which disagreements were expressed in terse, passive-aggressive sideswipes by two men who, as McCain might say, clearly "don't like each other very much." In such a format, meaningful discussion -- or even entertaining television -- is fairly impossible.
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4 comments:
I got really, really bored while I was watching it. I think some aggressive-aggressive would have been good for everyone.
Oh, and what's up with the CNN realtime undecided opinion graph? They can't just be content to tell us what to think after the debate; they have to tell us how to feel while we're watching too.
At least we got a new moniker for Obama.
"that one"
Yeah.
(I was going to say, “Not sure how I feel about that one,” but then I realized it would be ambiguous: would I have been indicating ambivalence toward the moniker (yes) or ambivalence toward Obama (no (I mean, I am sort of ambivalent but that's for policy reasons, and it would not have been what I was trying to indicate with that particular sentence))?)
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