Organizing for America | simeneh makonnen's Blog: BARACK OBAMA SHOWS PROFESSORIAL DISCIPLINE

BARACK OBAMA SHOWS PROFESSORIAL DISCIPLINE

By SIMENEH MAKONNEN - Oct 9th, 2008 at 9:46 pm EDT

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In the presidential matchup debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, it was one of Barack Obama’s possibly best performance of the campaign and I thought it had a lot to do with the format. All along we’ve heard how John McCain excels in town hall settings.

But tonight he seemed old, cranky, and downright tired as he trooped around the stage. His movements were stiff and jerky–surely a product of his brutal treatment in Vietnam, but nonetheless pitiless to watch. My hunch is that McCain has benefited from having the stage to himself in past town hall meetings. Sharing the spotlight with a much younger, more vigorous and agile Obama really highlighted his physical liabilities in a way that hadn’t previously been apparent.
By contrast, Obama really benefited from his years as a law professor. He was fluent and very much at ease walking and talking at the same time. He had a professor’s ability for making eye contact and maintaining it while he walked a questioner through a multi-step response. And his answers were much more concrete and intuitive than I’d ever heard them.

On the question of health care, for example, Obama was effective at defusing McCain’s cheap anti-government rhetoric with tangible evidence at every step of the way. He explained why healthcare should be a right by describing his mother’s fight with insurers during the final months of her life.

He explained that the reason he mandates coverage for children is that they’re “relatively cheap to insure and we don’t want them going to the emergency room for treatable illnesses like asthma.” And he exposed the shallowness of arguments about government intrusion by pointing out that, without regulators, insurers don’t always deliver on what you pay them for. The answer was so clear that it was professorial in the best sense.
The best example of Obama’s explanation came when the debate turned to Pakistan. The questioner seemed hostile to Obama’s approach: “Should the United States respect Pakistani sovereignty and not pursue al Qaeda terrorists who maintain bases there, or should we ignore their borders and pursue our enemies like we did in Cambodia during the Vietnam War?”
In response to the question, Obama did a number of important things. First, he provided some critical background: We wouldn’t even be having this discussion had Bush destroyed al Qaeda before invading Iraq. Instead, Bush allowed al Qaeda to escape to Pakistan, from which they’re sniping at our troops and destabilizing the region. Next, Obama explained that we’d first exhaust other options–giving the Pakistanis an incentive to do the job themselves–before launching a strike. Only at that point, he said, and only “if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out,” would he give the go-ahead. It was about as far from gratuitously belligerent as you could get–and all thanks to Obama’s soothing, professorial wrap up.

John McCain’s crankiness starting to show similarities with Australia’s war hero and a dogmatic racial creepy-crawly, Bruce Ruxtorn, whom I met once in the ABC TV studio full of audience discussing immigration issues. For that matter, both men resemble in the way they act, interact and spit bad languages of racial intolerance.

For his part, McCain mangled his explanations and stepped on his own canned punchlines. His diction was bizarrely geriatrician at times, culminating with his inexplicable reference to Obama as “that one”–language befitting a grandchild who refuses to eat his broccoli. McCain criticized his Democratic rival for supporting the 2007 Bush-Cheney energy bill, "It wa s an energy bill on the floor of the Senate, loaded down with goodies, billions for oil companies, and it was sponsored by Bush and Cheney. ... You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one," he said, gesturing toward Obama. "You know who voted against it? Me." To McCain’s demise, Obama recently said, "I can take four more weeks of John McCain's attacks, but America can't take four more years of John McCain's Bush policies." Though McCain has traditionally been deft at larding his responses with anecdotes, tonight was mostly argument by cranky assertion. I counted over a dozen times when McCain began a sentence or clause with the phrase “I know”–as in “I know how to get America working again” and “I know how to fix this economy.” Great, but a lot of voters don’t know and believe you. How about an example or two next time?

McCain faced a tough choice coming into this debate. He looked as if he wishes he wasn’t there. Tonight McCain managed to pull off an impressive achievement. He managed to do nothing particularly dramatic, yet still give the impression that he’s old and unsteady. I see very little for him to build on after tonight’s debate. Sorry, the game is over for John McCain.

Bush or McCain not AcGain!

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