No structure here; just some quick, morning-after random reactions:
Last night’s presidential debate was predictable, as most presidential debates are. The most surprising thing about it was how bad Jim Lehrer was (more on that in a moment). He had no control and I’m not sure his questions even qualified as questions. They certainly didn’t challenge either candidate.
Give Mitt Romney the edge, though his performance was not the knock out, virtuoso performance some pundits have started calling it. And who knows how much it will matter. John Kerry soundly won his first debate with George W. Bush in 2004 and Ronald Reagan was so bad during his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984 that questions about his age dominated the post-debate analysis. Last time I checked, neither Mondale or Kerry was elected president.
President Obama was flat. As he often is, he was too deliberate, too cautious, too pause-y, too lacking in humor.
As for Romney, one of these days I’ll put my finger on what it is about Romney’s voice that I find grating. This description isn’t quite it, but he speaks sort of spiccato — you know that bouncing bow sound violinists make. A narrow range of notes continuously cut short. Hyper and twitchy.
Anyway, the national media and punditry now has the Romney comeback narrative it’s been longing for. They’ll run with it until the next debate in a couple of weeks, especially if the September employment figures scheduled to be released tomorrow supplement the narrative. If the numbers are in Obama’s favor, then Romney’s debate victory may quickly lose any impact it has.
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During the debate I thought Romney’s move to the middle on taxes, education and health care would leave him with a tea party headache this morning, but maybe his promise to fire Big Bird and the early fawning over his performance have obscured the return of moderate Mitt. At least for now.
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Yes, it’s the economy, stupid, but last night’s debate on domestic issues ignored immigration reform, the environment, women’s health, abortion, Supreme Court appointments
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About Lehrer. You’d think that someone who has moderated about a dozen previous presidential debates would have done a better job, but one of the reasons Lehrer was there again in the moderator’s seat was he’s a non-threatening presence. He wasn’t going to ask questions with a high degree of difficulty. Don’t expect much more from Candy Crowley when she moderates the “town-hall” debate Oct. 16 or Bob Schieffer when he moderates the foreign policy debate Oct. 22.
Before the political parties wrested control of the debates from the League of Women Voters in 1988, debate questions came from a moderator and a panel of three or four newspaper, magazine or television journalists and columnists. The panel setup was abandoned in 1996. The town-hall format, first done in 1992, is better than the single-moderator format, in its limited way, but is a poor substitute for the news panel.
I’d like to see the news panel brought back, with national bloggers and cable news hosts such as Lawrence O’Donnell and Bill O’Reilly added to the mix. (Talk-show hosts would have to check their egos at the door, which might be too much to ask.) The odds of a return to the good old days of presidential debates are remote as long as the parties control the debates, but the single-moderator format has run its course.