UPDATE: A whole lot of people who did tune in didn’t like what they saw — and folks are ripping ABC a new one. Check out the 6000+ comments on the network’s site. DHinMI (Dana) at DKos sums up the performances of Gibson and Stephanopolus this way — Lee Atwater Lives.
UPDATE 2: If you missed it, Nicole Belle @ Crooks & Liars has more. I placed the mashup below the fold (along with a partial transcript for those of you who can’t view the mind-boggling video at work), as well as a video of George and Charlie getting heckled after the debate.
I didn’t bother turning on the presidential debate held in Pennsylvania tonight; thank goodness I didn’t. Based on the blow-by-blow, the majority of it involved ignoring actual issues — oh, say Iraq, health care, the economy. Apparently ABC’s Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos thought it would inform viewers more about where either candidate would take the country if they dredged up the various bloody political battles/scandals/bloopers of the campaign for deeper analysis. So much for the MSM taking the high road of “news” while the blogosphere represents the unwashed, unethical masses tapping away with Cheetos-stained keyboard fingers.
For those who did watch, did they bring up the latest flap over Hillary’s 1995 comments about lunch-bucket Dems (the demo she’s cozying up to these days):
Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.That surely would have given George and Charlie an on-air woody.“Screw ‘em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”
Think about this — ABC News has millions of Americans watching, the economy is in the sh*tter, Iraq is a mess, healthcare is in shambles, and you have 2 hours to discuss the issues of the day with the candidates. Look at the selection of topics and framing of questions. This is journalism? My, I thought these clips were from The Onion:
Dredging up the dumb running mate question…
GIBSON: There have already been many votes in many states, and you have each, as you analyze the vote, appealed disproportionately to different constituencies in the party, and that dismays many in the party. Governor Cuomo, an elder statesman in your party, has come forward with a suggestion. He has said, look, fight it to the end.
Let every vote be counted. You contest every delegate. Go at each other to the — right till the end. Don’t give an inch to one another. But pledge now that whichever one of you wins this contest, you’ll take the other as your running mate, and that the other will agree if they lose, to take second place on the ticket.
So I put the question to both of you: Why not?
***
The whole “bitter” blue collar worker BS (btw, it hasn’t hurt Obama in polls, so what is the point of this framing?)…
MR. GIBSON: Talking to a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco 10 days ago, you got talking in California about small-town Pennsylvanians who have had tough economic times in recent years. And you said they get bitter, and they cling to guns or they cling to their religion or they cling to antipathy toward people who are not like them.
Now, you’ve said you misspoke; you said you mangled what it was you wanted to say. But we’ve talked to a lot of voters. Do you understand that some people in this state find that patronizing and think that you said actually what you meant?
***
Yawn. The “electability” question
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me pick up on this. When these comments from Senator Obama broke on Friday, Senator McCain’s campaign immediately said that it was going to be a killer issue in November.
Senator Clinton, when Bill Richardson called you to say he was endorsing Barack Obama, you told him that Senator Obama can’t win. I’m not going to ask you about that conversation. I know you don’t want to talk about it. But a simple yes-or-no question: Do you think Senator Obama can beat John McCain or not?
***
Rev. Wright AGAIN
MR. GIBSON: Senator Obama, since you last debated, you made a significant speech in this building on the subject of race and your former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And you said subsequent to giving that speech that you never heard him say from the pulpit the kinds of things that so have offended people.
But more than a year ago, you rescinded the invitation to him to attend the event when you announced your candidacy. He was to give the invocation. And according to the reverend, I’m quoting him, you said to him, “You can get kind of rough in sermons. So what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.” I’m quoting the reverend. But what did you know about his statements that caused you to rescind that invitation?
***
More time frittered away on Wright…
MR. GIBSON: Senator Clinton, let me — I’m sorry, go ahead. Senator Clinton, let me follow up, and let me add to that. You have said that he would not have been my pastor, and you said that you have to speak out against those kinds of remarks, and implicitly by getting up and moving, and I presume you mean out of the church.
There are 8,000 members of Senator Obama’s church. And we have heard the inflammatory remarks of Reverend Wright, but so too have we heard testament to many great things that he did. Do you honestly believe that 8,000 people should have gotten up and walked out of that church?
***
O…M…G…
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, two questions. Number one, do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do? And number two, if you get the nomination, what will you do when those sermons are played on television again and again and again?
***
Here comes a question on the economic crisis..oh damn, first we need to learn more about Clinton’s Indiana Jones fantasy in Bosnia…
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Clinton, we also did a poll today, and there are also questions about you raised in this poll. About six in 10 voters that we talked to say they don’t believe you’re honest and trustworthy. And we also asked a lot of Pennsylvania voters for questions they had. A lot of them raised this honesty issue and your comments about being under sniper fire in Bosnia.
***
Great Caesar’s Ghost — why doesn’t Obama wear a flag pin!
MR. GIBSON: And Senator Obama, I want to do one more question, which goes to the basic issue of electability. And it is a question raised by a voter in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a woman by the name of Nash McCabe. Take a look.
NASH MCCABE (Latrobe, Pennsylvania): (From videotape.) Senator Obama, I have a question, and I want to know if you believe in the American flag. I am not questioning your patriotism, but all our servicemen, policemen and EMS wear the flag. I want to know why you don’t.
MR. GIBSON: Just to add to that, I noticed you put one on yesterday. But — you’ve talked about this before, but it comes up again and again when we talk to voters. And as you may know, it is all over the Internet. And it’s something of a theme that Senators Clinton and McCain’s advisers agree could give you a major vulnerability if you’re the candidate in November. How do you convince Democrats that this would not be a vulnerability?
***
The clock is ticking on the 2 hour debate…will the questions turn to global warming…NO, it’s time to talk about radicals from the 70s!
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to give Senator Clinton a chance to respond, but first a follow-up on this issue, the general theme of patriotism in your relationships. A gentleman named William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11 he was quoted in The New York Times saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.”
An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly. Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem?
The full transcript of the debate is here.
And look at this — Charlie and George are heckled by the audience after the debate:
***
In more pleasant news…Woohoo — I received press credentials for tomorrow’s Obama Town Hall in Raleigh.
I phoned the North Carolina Press Office of Obama for America and confirmed that I have press credentials for the Raleigh Town Hall Meeting @ the Kerr Scott Building on the State Fairgrounds. Media Access is at 11:00 AM, so I'll have to get there early for parking and the security screening. I'm sure traffic will be a bear. I will take pix and video, and perhaps do live blogging over at the Blend, depending on the set up.
Tickets (free) are required for the public event, and those were gone in a flash. The venue normally holds about 2,000 people.
37 Responses to “I did laundry rather than watch tonight’s debate”
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That debate made Baby Jesus cry. Two hours of my life I will never get back, and on top of that, now I have to Wikipedia the goddamn Weather Underground to figure out what heck they were talking about.
Consider yourself lucky, Pam, it was like watching a dog show moderated by Entertainment Tonight. Honestly I’m surprised they didn’t make Obama and Clinton over who loved America more.
That debate was truly awful. It’s exactly what turned people off about politics. Inane and petty drivel.
no question about government corruption, housing, Nafta, torture, environment, etc etc…
50 minutes spend on flag pin, bittergate, etc?
come on.
The debate was nothing but laundry list of Clinton’s attack liner. This is how she suppose to run her next administration? media manipulation, feeding line, her ex-media person softball question, etc.
disgusting.
On the other hand, it makes you think she could beat McCain.
How, by pummeling him with a relentless barrage of right-wing-media smears?
I think TPM points out another important item
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/189521.php
What I didn’t like about the debate, though, was the debate itself. Not only were most of the questions on partisan gotchas and frivolous points. But more importantly the questions upon which the candidates were pressed the most were ones that presumed the correctness of Republican agenda items, sometimes explicitly so — on taxes, capital gains taxes, gun rights, Iraq, etc.
There are issues like health care, and whose proposal will achieve universal coverage; some question about the credit crisis; perhaps some question about Iraq that presupposed that getting out is a necessary objective — like, noting ways that each has hedged on their promises to leave Iraq, rather than a question, the subtext of which was ‘what will you do when the serious people tell you we shouldn’t leave’; something executive power — a legitimate questions since presidents are seldom willing to renounce powers grasped by predecessors; the environment; perhaps, what will these candidates actually do — concretely — to crack down on executive branch corruption since Democrats have made such political hay of the issue at President’s Bush’s expense; perhaps a single question on the environment?
Crap, I dunno. Can she out-Rove Rove?
Either way, God help us all.
I am simultaneously earnest and sarcastic when I say hey, at least the media took a break from its anti-Clinton misogyny for a night!
This wasn’t a Democratic debate about Democratic issues: this was a Republican smear-machine.
I think we all knew that Georgey was on Sean Hannity’s show the other day taking notes, but did anyone think he would actually use them? I’ve never screamed so loud at a television before tonight.
The comments are at around 9700 right now, and probably 9 out of 10 are scathing criticism of ABC and their mock-debate. Seriously, follow the link to read the comments: I couldn’t believe my eyes but it makes me proud to be an American.
Am I the only one who thinks that having one of the debate moderators a former Clinton administration employee was just a bit odd?
GS would be a local weatherman if he hadn’t gotten that first White House job.
Even though the local Philly station kept trumpeting the debate, I didn’t watch it either.
However, it’s a little bit difficult for those two candidates to have an issues-oriented debate, since they’re really both pretty close on the issues; their differences are in matters of degree, not kind, and when you get to relatively small differences like they have, there’s no reason to take a distinction: no matter what they say, anything they advocate is going to get changed by the Congress.
I watched some of it. Gibson definitely had it out for Obama. I’m surprised he didn’t use the ‘Obama bin Laden’ line and then throw out some ‘boy’ and other more overt racism.
To say it was a disaster and rather biased is an understatement.
George Stepnfetchit has been such a retard since the ‘glory days’. In what he’s done since it’s hard to tell that he worked for a democratic president.
There’s just not enough lipstick to put on that pig to get anything close to useful out of it… The debate sucked and blew, at the same time.
Laundry+ Politics… hmm, Pam has posed me a puzzler. How the hell do you find a joke in that…
Okay. How about these potential campaign slogans?
“These Colors Don’t Run!”
“Sock It To Me!”
“Together, we can CLEAN HOUSE!”
And for re-election:
“Rinse and Repeat!”
I only watched a few moments at the end and the moderators sucked and blew and just generally stank up the room. The debates have been a travesty all along the line but this one actually managed to be the WORST DEBATE EVER. They have to take the debate format and organization out of the hands of the incompetent media and put it back in the capable hands of the League of Women Voters. Those debates made sense, they were well structured and you came away having learned something. While I doubt that the candidates are desperate to have real debates, they have got to finally be tired of debates that would have been handled better by TMZ.
I haven’t watched a single moment of ABC News product since the network as a whole aired the “Path to 9/11″ (AKA “Path to Propaganda”), so I didn’t watch what sounds like an embarrassing performance even for George the Empty Suit and Cheery Charlie.
I am glad to hear that they’re getting ripped in comments and reviews, though. At this point, most politically aware people understand how utterly useless and empty TV news is (I used to work in the business, so I gave up on it when I left 15+ years ago). What’s new is the average viewer’s unwillingness to stay silent about their contempt for their superficial nonsense and clumsy tabloid-style smears. And it seems to me that Obama has been leading that charge lately.
hing fun on the topic via Wampum-
http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/obama-debate-congratulatory-madlib/
1. I need to learn how to embed.
2. I need to not cut off words at the beginning of sentences- hing fun is something fun.
Your tolerance is appreciated.
Hawise, MikeEss taught me the trick of embedding last weekend (boy, does that sound fun and dirty! ha!) Anyways… took me a few tries, but this works.
When you get to the point where you want to embed a link and add your own commentary, you would type (but without the “” or the line spaces; I put them in so this would show up on screen):
“”
Text to show as link( ie, your words)
“”
The trick is to remember both the beginning and ending on each half.
As for cutting yourself off- I have never figured out HOW to do that and always say too damned MUCH! Good luck!
“Rinse and Repeat!”
…which will have to be done over and over, with lots of healty scrubbing in between, to get the stain of the Cheney/Bush years out of the fabric of America.
And even then, it still might not work. Time “heals all wounds”, but the visible scars will remain forever…
Bloody hell; that didn’t work!
MikeEss, help us…
Okay, new slogan-
“Tired of Getting Soaked? Try Our Candidate- A New Extra Strength Formula Designed to Remove Those Pesky Stubborn Built-In DC Stains!”
There’s special coding that has to be done to get the “angle brackets” to show up…
Here goes:
<a href=”url_of_link_you_want”>Text you want to be a link</a>
The link would be a standard url like “http://google.com”, etc.
When executed properly, it look like this: Text you want to be a link
Have a happy HTML experience!…
louise, I made a comment to explain link embedding, and ironically, it’s in moderation.
I’m sure Amanda will dig it out, so be a little patient…
:)
ouise April 17, 2008 at 7:45 am
When you get to the point where you want to embed a link and add your own commentary, you would type (but without the “” or the line spaces; I put them in so this would show up on screen)”
with phising these days, it is usually a good idea to post in “pure text” as much as possible. (some people drop the http, to force a person to read the whole url, opening another window and do manual cut and paste.) Just to prevent newbie to click anything that looks clickable. It’s a dangerous exercise these days.
but of course that’s just added security step, old school way.
Laundry+ Politics… hmm, Pam has posed me a puzzler. How the hell do you find a joke in that…
Spin
Brilliant!
I didn’t feel well last night and went to bed early
AND I’m glad I did!
So glad I went out for a burrito, then jeans shopping (not recommended post-burrito, by the way), then wandered my ass home last night just in time to forget all about the debate.
Yeah, if there’s anything more striking than the media’s fascination with what the candidates said and did thirty years ago, it’s the media’s complete lack of interest in what the candidates are going to do about torture, Iraq, the housing crisis, etc.
And just how many “average people” did they have to interview to find somebody who’s still interested in the whole flag lapel flap? Or did they just send over to Freeperland?
Mr Ess wrote:
There is a quick and easy comment quicktags plug-in for WordPress, which, if our hosts installed it, would put the proper coding functions in user-friendly buttons.
“There is a quick and easy comment quicktags plug-in for WordPress…”
I’m sure there is. But we don’t have it, and louise had tried to help Hawise but couldn’t get the angle brackets to show, so her comment was incomplete.
For future reference:
To code a ‘less than’ bracket/symbol (<): <
To code a ‘greater than’ bracket/symbol (>): >
For what it’s worth…
I looked around (a little) for some really simple guide to HTML, but they all look too intimidating for the novice.
Any suggestions?…
Hell, I’m still a half-Luddite- “novice” would be a step UP!
I used the little “try it” demos at www.w3schools.com — they’re ridiculously easy and you can doublecheck your link right from their screen.
Tryit Editor v1.4
Though I did have my comments break in a weird way for weeks until I figured out that there wasn’t supposed to be a return after the first command.
Thanks Mnem. I use that site as a reference for CSS stuff.
Because I work with it literally every day, I’ve completely lost contact with what it’s like to be a neophyte trying to use HTML. I know all kinds of great references, but they all assume you already know quite a bit and are just looking for details on some seldom used feature, etc.
I guess you could say I’m an “elitist”…
Elitist instead of Pican?
You both are sweethearts for sharing the info and I for one THANK YOU!!
via TPM
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/189807.php
Remember that woman from the debate last night who the moderators showed videotape of asking whether Barack Obama “believes in the flag”? Her name is Nash McCabe.
I remember thinking it was sort of odd to have a couple one-off uses of ordinary voter question when it didn’t really seem like it was part of the format. But I was too distracted by the general inanity of the debate to focus on this issue too closely.
Well, it turns out TPM Reader JL did give some thought. And he came up with something very interesting (see JL’s post at the DrexelDems blog). He did a little googling and found out Nash is pretty popular with the traveling press now in Pennsylvania. It turns out McCabe was featured in an April 4th story in the Times which begins like this …
Ask whom she might vote for in the coming presidential primary election and Nash McCabe, 52, seems almost relieved to be able to unpack the dossier she has been collecting in her head.
It is not about whom she likes, but more a bill of particulars about why she cannot vote for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
“How can I vote for a president who won’t wear a flag pin?” Mrs. McCabe, a recently unemployed clerk typist, said in a booth at the Valley Dairy luncheonette in this quiet, small city in western Pennsylvania.
Mr. Obama has said patriotism is about ideas, not flag pins.
“I watch him on TV,” Mrs. McCabe said. “I keep looking for that lapel pin.”
Now, it does seem like McCabe is not a fan of Sen. Obama’s. And I think we can assume that it’s not a coincidence that McCabe managed to show up featured in the Times and also as the sole outside questioner in the ABC debate. Presumably, a researcher for ABC or Gibson saw the piece in the Times, figured, hey, this lady hates Obama and is seriously ginned up about the lapel issue. Let’s send a camera crew Obama and film her slamming Obama to his face. It’ll be great in the debate.