From the Department of Presidential Debate Redundancy Department: 236.com makes a pretty valid point about the presidential debates: Um, what was the point of the last two?

[Read more →]

Here’s last night’s SNL sketch of the final debate, mostly focused on John McCain’s obsession with Joe the Plumber.  The notion that Joe is McCain’s imaginary friend actually isn’t too far from the truth.  McCain thought Joe was a plumber making over $250,000 who would pay higher taxes under Obama’s plan, and an upstanding, tax-paying, unbiased [...]

[Read more →]

This is a real picture taken at last night’s debate.  One of these men will be the next President of the United States.  Does anything more really need to be said?

[Read more →]

Two days ago, I wrote this about how out of touch John McCain’s campaign has become in its final days: C-SPAN just aired John McCain’s rally in New Mexico, and it looked like it was taking place on a different planet.  McCain’s entire speech was focused on what you don’t know about Barack Obama, what you need to know [...]

[Read more →]

Well, she showed up.  She stood at the right podium.  She mostly spoke English, gosh darnit.  And the media’s post-debate analysis had to be the most condescending display of lowered bar cheerleading in American political history. Last night, pundits and conservatives applauded Sarah Palin for not tripping over her feet on the way to the podium and not using the phrases “U.S. Americans” or [...]

[Read more →]

Some must-see commentary from Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, a guy I consider to be one of the best foreign policy analysts in the country.  The short version: The problem with Sarah Palin isn’t that she doesn’t know the answers, it’s that she doesn’t even understand the questions. As far as tonight’s debate is concerned, my pre-game analysis [...]

[Read more →]

My immediate take on last night’s debate: Remarkably serious.  Remarkably newsless.  I’ll spare you the in-depth analysis, you already know who I thought won.  Instead, here’s five things you may have missed. 1. McCain taking subliminal shots at his own age Think McCain is a little insecure about his age? At least three times last night, [...]

[Read more →]

I’m not going to say Barack Obama has a chance to win Pennsylvania.  He doesn’t.  But I can’t imagine anything making a stronger case for his campaign theme of moving beyond old school Washington politics than the ABC News debate last night.  I’m guessing that for every undecided voter who watched that debate and came away [...]

[Read more →]

For some reason, I thought there was a debate scheduled tonight.  At 8:00 p.m., I turned my television to ABC expecting to see Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama answering questions posed by objective journalists.  Instead, they were showing some two-hour infomercial on why Hillary Clinton should be the Democratic nominee, hosted by former Clinton senior political [...]

[Read more →]

There’s been a lot of complaining in recent weeks by the Clinton campaign about what they perceive to be the media’s uneven treatment between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  But Jonathan Martin over at Politico caught a moment in Tuesday’s debate where the media very noticably gave Clinton a pass.  When asked if she could [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been making note of the fact that, in the last five CNN debates– which were all sponsored by the coal industry front group Americans for Better Energy Choices (ABEC)– there were coincidentally no questions asked about climate change.  But environmentalist blog The Green Miles notices that there were no questions asked about climate change in Tuesday’s [...]

[Read more →]

In potentially the final Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both candidates stayed on message and executed their gameplans, despite the best attempts of NBC newsmen Brian Williams and Tim Russert.  While Obama looked to remain presidential and above the fray, Clinton sought to force her opponent into a mistake that might turn the race [...]

[Read more →]

Commenter “david, with ABEC” takes issue with last week’s suggestion that there may be a connection between CNN’s lack of debate questions on climate change and the fact that their debates have been sponsored by ABEC, a coal industry front group: While we are flattered that there are some people out there who are convinced we can dictate the questions of [...]

[Read more →]

For those of us who’ve been keeping score, last night’s event makes five straight CNN debates sponsored by coal industry front group Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) without a single question about climate change policy.

[Read more →]

The real debate tonight wasn’t between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, it was between Clinton advisers Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald.  A New York Times story on the internal discussions this week in the Clinton campaign framed the debate like this: Even now, after a string of defeats, her advisers are divided over how to [...]

[Read more →]