Brokaw won. He picked only questions that could have come from My Weekly Reader. How many of the questions amounted to “The country’s hurting, what will you do?” Of course the two-dimensional idea of President-as-Patron favors Obama.
But how about questions like these: “What’s the relationship between health insurance and health care costs, and how can you keep health care costs down?” Or “Why are American children still failing in schools when the Annenberg Foundation has spent so much money to make education better?” Or “When either of you becomes president, how will you check the backgrounds of federal appointees to find out if they might be Marxists *before you appoint them*?”
With all the thousands of questions that Brokaw received, he must have systematically picked those least challenging to the candidates and viewers. And posing the least challenging questions gives an advantage to Obama.
I’m sure that this has already been said on a million blogs since last night, but McCain’s answer to the “what don’t you know?” question should have been,
“I don’t know enough about Barack Obama’s background and ideology, and I hope I don’t have to learn it by seeing him in the White House.”
I do know about Barack Obama, so I think he lost big just by showing up and continuing to deceive us about himself. Those who don’t know might understandably have seen the debate differently.
