Once again, God help me, I watched the entire debate last night. I don’t quite know why, as it wasn’t that great as spectacle, and it’s not like there was any way it would change my vote…<\/p>\n
I wound up being struck by something, though. The last eight years have made me pretty cynical about American politics and the American public. Hell, the last twenty-eight years have made me pretty cynical– I first became politically aware during the Reagan era, after all. I’ve spent most of my life watching sleazy pandering contests– Bill Clinton was a bright spot, and that tells you something.<\/p>\n
I was really impressed, though, by the way Obama chose to go directly against the cynical approach last night, and in the other debate I watched (the “town hall” thing was just a smarm-off, and I couldn’t stand it). He sat there and acted like the American people are thinking adults– he gave facts, reported numbers (he evidently has more faith in people’s ability to understand percentages than I do), and even during the shamefully embarrassing “Please talk about your attack ads” portion of the evening, he resisted the “Oh, yeah?!?”<\/a> responses most partisans were pushing. He projected seriousness and absolute calm.<\/p>\n And I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked. The early polling<\/a> says voters preferred Obama by something like 2-1. It’s rare that a moment of political theater makes me feel better about my country, but amazingly, that did.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (Now, granted, part of the margin is undoubtedly due to McCain’s performance, which was erratic and incoherent even by the standards of recent GOP presidential candidates. To paraphrase an old MST3K episode, the secret of Obama’s power lies in the ineptitude of his opponent. But still, it’s a nice change to see someone come out and act as if the American people are something better than a pack of frightened grade-school children.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once again, God help me, I watched the entire debate last night. I don’t quite know why, as it wasn’t that great as spectacle, and it’s not like there was any way it would change my vote… I wound up being struck by something, though. The last eight years have made me pretty cynical about… Continue reading Cynicism and the Debates<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}