Just watched the Democratic debate in SC, which is officially my second debate ever. It was quite a contrast to the previous one I saw.

Hi-Def is not a friend to Hillary. She looks at least 10 years older than she does on regular TV. In general, she didn’t come off looking as well in this debate as the last one. She resorted to a lot of “attack” tactics, which comes across as very old school. And negative. I think the country is ready to move past that.

She is an excellent traditional debater. In high school debate, she would have totally and completely annihilated the competition. But the other candidates are no longer playing by the sling and spin rules - in fact, they’re calling her on it, which immediately renders those methods ineffective. She’s using outdated tactics and that approach is hurting her.

The other thing that I thought detracted from her showing was her tendency to refer to Republicans as “the enemy.” Those are my quotation marks, not hers, but her repeated statements infer that position very strongly. She obviously expects to go into presidency ready for combat - in a way that makes me think both sides would lose.

John Edwards did better this time around. When the answer to his first question was, “First of all, I’d like to say [insert totally irrelevant statement here],” I wanted to bash my head into the wall at the thought of listening to 2 more hours of his non-answers. But he was able to pull himself together pretty well after that and stick (relatively) close to the questions, especially during the back-and-forth Clinton-Obama showdowns.

I think Obama did well. He stood up for himself, most of the time without giving Hillary too much credit for her accusations. A tactic that he and Edwards have both mastered - which Hillary notably has not - is the commendation of other candidates. While Hillary continues to sling mud, Obama and Edwards are not afraid to commend their opponents on certain stances and issues. That positive approach is refreshing.

I really found the transformation between the first and second halves of the debate to be interesting. The first half behind the podiums was very formal - and very combative. The moderator had a terrible time just getting the candidates to shut up in a reasonable time frame, as all they wanted to do was argue with and accuse each other. The second half, where everyone was sitting down, was more conversational, more agreeable, and more like the previous debate I saw. There were virtually no “rules” - but none were needed, and it was much more comfortable.

I noticed a lot of attempts by the candidates to draw distinctions between themselves and their opponents. However, most of the time it didn’t really seem to work (because the distinctions they were drawing were determined inaccurate), which makes me think the democrats are not all THAT different from each other. One noticeable difference that I’ve touched on before is that Obama doesn’t believe health insurance should be mandatory. Clinton and Edwards tried to make that out to be a bad thing - the “it will never work” argument - but did not give any substantial reason why. I don’t think they succeeded in pushing down that stance.

I’m looking forward to the Republican debate on Thursday. I haven’t really heard much from the Republicans on several issues I’m concerned about, so it will be interesting to see if they actually have viable plans. The democrats have determined that John McCain is going to be the Republican nominee, so they’re gearing up for campaigning against him specifically. I’m not as certain that it’s so clear-cut at this point.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.