Presidential Debate Recap... sort of.

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I’m sorry, but I watched the debates last night too. It was no “tie,” and Obama did not merely “hold his own.” It was a slaughter, but why isn’t anybody saying so?

Aside from Obama forgetting McCain’s name from time to time, “Jim? Tom?” at no point did he lose his footing nor give any ground to McCain on his supposed strength. Sure, McCain was able to list off world leaders in the Baltic and former Soviet states, and over the course of his 26 year Senate career has traveled extensively. But it comes nowhere close to making up for his grouchy mumbling through a long series of Republican talking points. In any case, McCain needed to win this debate outright given the troubles his record has given him over the past week. That didn’t happen.

Here’s the transcript if you want to relive the beating in all it’s word-by-word glory.

But if you don’t, here are a few items that haven’t seemed to get much notice yet, but I found telling:

Obama: The McCain/Bush “orgy of spending” is “hard to swallow.” We haven’t had this sort of salacious news coverage since the Lewinsky trial. Good work, Barry and Jim*.

After both candidates gave pretty similar, in my mind, answers about Russia being the aggressor in the conflict with Georgia, McCain dropped this little propaganda bomb, left over from 1985: “…Russia has now become a nation fueled by petro-dollars that is basically a KGB apparatchik-run government. I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters, a "K," a "G," and a "B."” I would feel SO much safer with McCain, and his nuanced view of the world, in the White House Situation Room.

McCain: “America is still the greatest producer, exporter and importer.” Sorry, China passed us in exports in 2006. However, we are the world leader in debt obligations to other countries ($13T), so we have THAT going for us, which is nice…

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as proposed by McCain: “What I have proposed for a long time, and I've had conversation with foreign leaders about forming a league of democracies, let's be clear and let's have some straight talk.” A new world order? Where have I heard that before…? Oh, wait, you mean the former president was actually speaking in SUPPORT of the United Nations?

The man just knows world affairs. McCain on Iran: “The Iranians have a lousy government, so therefore their economy is lousy, even though they have significant oil revenues.” Is that why you won’t talk to them, John? And speaking of, do you really know who controls Iran? For starters, it’s not Ahmadinejad, whose name you can’t pronounce.

While Sarah Palin didn’t field questions after the debate (liberal media bias**), reporters did catch up to her in Philadelphia and asked what she thought about the debate. "McCain did awesome. He was great. He was absolutely on his game." That was “on his game?” We have another shellacking to look forward to…

Anyways, we’re likely going hear about the debate for the next couple of weeks, and I couldn’t be more excited.

VOTE
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* Obama: “I just want to make this point, John, it's been your president who you said you agreed with 90 percent of the time who presided over this increase in spending. This orgy of spending and enormous deficits you voted for almost all of his budgets. So to stand here and after eight years and say that you're going to lead on controlling spending and, you know, balancing our tax cuts so that they help middle class families when over the last eight years that hasn't happened I think just is, you know, kind of hard to swallow.”

** "We've been getting some emails from viewers out there wondering why we spent some time interviewing Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee and not Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee. We would have loved to interview--we'd still love to interview Sarah Palin. Unfortunately we asked, we didn't get that interview...We're hoping that Sarah Palin will join us at some point down the road." Wolf Blitzer, CNN, 9/26/08