Friday, October 3, 2008

St. Louis Blues........... thoughts on the debate

This is a pretty full extended weekend for me. Last night I had a long planned date with my wife to do the annual Columbia Jazz and Wine Pub Crawl.


http://wealwaysswing.org/schedule/event/pubcrawl/

Friday and Saturday is the second annual Roots n' Blues n' Barbecue Festival.

http://www.rootsnbluesnbbq.com/

So am I keeping pretty busy, in addition to the canvassing I did last night. I didn't have a whole lot of time to watch and analyze the debate. My take away from the debate and response was.

Biden won - no surprise.
Palin met expectations - no surprise.
No major gaffes = no surprise.

Pretty much a non event.

With the trajectory currently sharply in favor of Obama they will happily take last nights effort. What really worked for the Obama camp was Palin wasn't going to stray too far from talking points or get too far out on a limb in the negative area. This allowed Joe to do what he wanted to do and go after McCain. Palin had to worry just as much about defending her reputation as she was at defending the McCain campaign.

The subtle but maybe most important aspect may fly under the radar. Biden continued strengthning the Obama brand. If one accepts the model laid out that a number of voters do not want to vote for McCain but are not certain about Obama, then last night continued the message that Obama established last Friday night. Obama - Biden is smart, experienced, calm, cool, collected leaderly. Last nights performance will continue to convince people that Obama is a very plausible alternative to the current disaster we have. In this regards I conisder this a big win for the Obama camp.

Remember the McCain campaign's premise is that Obama / Obama - Biden are not a safe or viable alternative. Biden went a long way to knocking that premise down. Now we have a news cycle about how they did, about the bail out. Everyday Obama is up front without a major story to his negative is one step closer to 270 electoral votes.

One last thing. Palin did a good job of meeting expectations. However, if I remember right meets expectations was always a "C" in school. I think America is tired of having a "C" President or vice-president. As people go over last nights debate and analyse individual answers and go arounds it is becoming quite apparent she offered little. But she did get through the night.

1 comment:

eric said...

I thought it was a pretty boring debate overall. Nothing too important or surprising came up. I definitely would rather strive to have an "A" student like Obama as the leader of our country. I knew way too many "C" students who might have been fine people, but I wouldn't want them leading us through financial crisis or getting out of Iraq.