US Presidential Debates
September 24, 2008
Good news for political junkies, the ABC will be airing the US Presidential and Vice Presidential debates live on ABC1 and online.
The first one is this Saturday at 11am, so it will be a nice alternative to listening to the pre-game tosh before the AFL grand final.
Update: McCain wants to suspend his campaign and reschedule the debates. He stood up Dave Letterman, who isn’t impressed by either event.
Update 2: McCain refuses to attend the debate until congress gives Wall Street money.
Excuse me, but I thought you were focused on a deck warming.
That’s also un-Australian Dave. Your priorities could do with an adjustment.
But, I’ll be watching the debate all the same
Anything would be better than watching the pre-game hype. In fact I think anything would be better tham watching the grand final full-stop, which I expect to be a totally one-sided affair, with Geelong romping away from the first bounce, like last year.
On that matter (last year), the Channel 10 signal failed for the Ovens Valley in 2007 so we just went out and worked and watched the Austar replay at about 6pm. Just as well, what a boring game it was.
Greg, I have to admit that I’m following this election a lot more closely than any US election before. Although I was disappointed when Gore and Kerry lost, I think that there’s a lot more riding on this year’s election. I genuinely think that Obama can bring monumental change to the USA and, by extension, the rest of the world. I find it hard to articulate exactly what I’m looking for in this race, but I fear that if McCain wins the election he and his cronies will do even more damage than Bush has.
This morning news has announced that McCain has sought to ’suspend’ the campaign to focus on getting the recovery package through. This will involve re-scheduling the first debate. Obama, at this stage, has not agreed.
Other than getting busted being on CBS, it’s a pretty smart move by McCain to talk about ditching the debate. By forcing Obama to Washington, where Bush has just invited him to, any package passed will be termed ‘bi-partisan’ and equal credit will be given to Obama and McCain. This is a loss for Obama and a win for McCain.
I guess Obama needs to keep focusing on the fact that Republicans can’t multitask. Bush spent the last 7 plus years focussing on the war and ignoring the economy, oil, housing, health insurance etc. McCain is now demonstrating the same blinkered abilities.
I get the feeling the winner will be the one who makes the best impression on the Letterman show. It happened when Bush was first elected. He went on Letterman and came across as a funny & harmless sort of guy, whereas Gore didn’t adapt as well to the Letterman style of interview.
Letterman may only have an audience equal to about 5% of the US population but the cuts from his show make it onto all the national news programs and Americans are influenced by these things more than by the debates.
The other way of looking at this is that McCain is just playing the expectation game. The Obama camp has been spinning that he is the lesser debater so the expectation for McCain is higher. Now it is Obama who is going to have to beg for a debate, therefore switching the expectation.
The reality is that the bill will be amended and deemed passable by Thursday night (U.S) as, regardless of the issues each side has, everyone agrees that it has to get through. They can’t delay it for another week. In any event, all Obama has to do is to offer to turn it into a televised Town Hall event and the McCain camp will come running.