McCain-Obama II

John McCain: You need a friend,
but please stop calling on me

Let’s get this out of the way: John McCain is not my friend. I’ve never met the man, and he certainly does not know me.

Neither is Barack Obama my friend. He doesn’t know me, either – but at least does not pretend to be my friend.

I don’t trust people who use the word “friend” over and over again, and sound like a used car dealer trying to unload a clunker on a naive shopper. An old used car dealer, whose slick is wearing thin.

If I had to choose, I’d want Obama as a friend. But I’ll settle for giving him my vote – as the winner of Tuesday night’s debate and for president.

Obama could have done better. There were responses I wanted him to give to some of the questions, and mistakes that made me wince – especially pulling Delaware banking laws out of the political closet as an unfortunate metaphor in addressing a lack of requirements for health insurers in some states.

It might be true, but hey – the Republicans lately had not been going back to allegations of Joe Biden being cozy with Delaware-based bank/credit card companies. That’ll change as Election Day nears.

I enjoyed the spectacle of McCain dropping a line that many in the audience had probably used eBay – this from a candidate who has never even learned to email. So the work of his writers was transparent – it was just a line fed to McCain to make him sound current.

He’s not current. He’s the past. It was apparent from McCain’s repetitive answers that he’s still fighting the Vietnam war. He still thinks the only way out is victory, when there may be no such thing in Iraq any more than there was in Vietnam. Not for America, and not for Iraq after we went in and busted up the place so badly for the sake of regime change.

George W. Bush talked a few months ago about establishing a “time horizon” for getting out. One thing about the horizon – you never get there. And McCain doesn’t even have the horizon in sight.

The Great Debate

They both screwed up, but
Biden came through at the end

Joe Biden muffed it. For more than half the time, he forgot to look into the camera and failed to talk directly to Middle America in straight and simple terms. Even so, he came closer to answering questions and – at the end – gave everyone a rare gift: A glimpse of his soul.

In the epic science fiction novel “Dune,” the desert-dwellers are stunned when the young exiled prince “gives water to the dead” by crying.

In American politics, tears don’t always play well in election campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s tears helped her, but only briefly, in this year’s Democratic presidential primary battle. In 1972, supposed tears in New Hampshire helped short-circuit Edmund Muskie’s quest.

Thursday night, near the end of his debate with Sarah Palin, Biden welled up emotionally, fighting back the tears as he recalled the tragic highway deaths decades ago of his first wife and their daughter and the ordeals of his injured sons. It was all there for America to see.

Palin was ice cold by comparison, after being sequestered and rehearsed for a week in mystical Sedona, Ariz.

She learned her lines very well: “Wall Street greed” was hammered on half a dozen times, although once she mixed up Main Street and Wall Street, and she looked like a pleased schoolgirl at her successful pronunciation of “Ahmadinejad” (learned so nice, she said it twice).

While Palin was short on substance and avoided answering questions as she returned to her repetitions and obviously concentrated on the talking points she had been taught, Biden spoke too often away from and above his audience.

Biden failed to challenge Palin’s qualifications for the vice presidency. Some observers had expressed the opinion that directly confronting her lack of knowledge and her inexperience beyond the borders of one of America’s least-populated states would backfire, but to my eyes, Palin’s embarrassing answer about “only being here five weeks” could have been repeated by Biden. He was far too deferential, instead giving toothy smile after toothy smile.

When Palin went on the attack, she did it with a smarmy smile, cloying winks, and folksy “aw, shucks” manner sure to distract many voters from any misinformation, mistakes and lack of knowledge. She was back to being good old Hockey Mom, and she’s carrying the Republicans’ big stick.

Who won? That's a matter of, well... debate.