Debate on Mars

Because the American Bullshit Network taped-delayed tonight's debate for the West Coast, I had the unusual experience of hearing the punditry pronouncements before I saw any of the debate. Often enough I've found my experience of debates different from what I heard from commentators, but tonight it's so different that there must have been another debate in a parallel universe I didn't see.

Chuck Todd is only one of the pundits who saw this as a bad Obama performance, partly because the A Bullshitters spent the first 50 minutes of a two hour debate on what Obama kept calling "distractions." (Apparently only Halperin dissents, giving Obama a B+ grade, and Clinton a B.) Every time these issues come up--'bitter,' Rev. Wright, the flag pin for chrissakes, and now an elderly Weatherman--the pundits go crazy, they find a few people who are credulous and offended, and then there's an election and/or the polls come out, and nobody else really cares. Obama has answered these questions, and he did so insistently and in context again tonight.

The upshot was that for those 50 minutes, he did most of the talking, and Clinton just stood there. He couched all his explanations and answers in terms of his rationale and main argument for running. I think he talked directly to viewers and voters, and he connected. And so I think Chuck Todd and the others are full of the same shit as the American Bullshit Corporation "journalists," neocon Charlie Whatshisname and former Clinton press secretary George Stepinitalloverus.

Update: The TV punditry didn't have much to say about ABC but print and Internet writers sure have. Tom Shales, TV critic for the Washington Post, writes that the ABC hosts "turned in shoddy, despicable performances."
"For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with."

This is how people were responding on live threads during the debate and now in a host of online columns on HuffPost, etc. ABC got thousands of critical comments, there's talk that the studio audience was in revolt. ABC hasn't heard the end of this. Even Gov. Ed Rendell was critical.

In the meantime, Obama picked up four more super-delegates Wednesday. And that doesn't count Bruce Springsteen--the boss also endorsed him.

And as Kos points out, Hillary ceded her stealth "he's unelectable" argument by admitting that Obama can win against McCain.

The saddest line in Shales' rebuke was that the cable channels did a better job running these debates. My first thought after seeing much of the debate was expressed by Marty Kaplan--give these debates back to the League of Women Voters--and by a commenter on his thread-- and put them on PBS.