I didn’t watch the debates on Friday night, but I did hear pieces of it on C-span radio while running errands this morning. The pieces I heard reminded me of everything I hate about the presidential debates. The leader of the country should not be picked based on one-liners, looks, or the ability to reduce a complex issue into a 20 word sound bite. Yet elections in this country are a sport, and the debates are one of the venues of competition. (The election itself and the polls being the other main venues). This is why we spend so much time worrying about who “won” the debate and the handlers try to convince the public that their candidate “won”. One would think that the public would decide whose positions they liked better and the polls would reveal who won, but we can’t watch a sporting event without a scoreboard, and we need to have someone tell us who won before we can know who to support. (The winner of course – who wants to support a loser?)

In terms of the debate itself, I heard more of the same stuff I abhor. McCain has clearly realized that nice guys finish second (as he did in 2000 when GWB and Rove used an insanely dirty and underhanded campaign to stop him). McCain initially tried to reject what he called the “politics of destruction” but in desperation it looks like he’s reversed course. McCain spent a lot of time distorting Obama’s record, and Obama, rather than retaliate in kind, spent an approximately equal amount of time refuting those charges. (for example, Obama and the dems tried to push an Iraq war bill that included a timetable, while the Republicans and McCain pushed one that didn’t. Each voted for their own bill and not the other. McCain accused Obama of “not supporting the troops” because of this.) This of course means that McCain “won” those sections of the debate because he was on offense. (Perhaps PBS can keep track of the time of possession for us). Should Obama lose he’ll probably turn to the same tactics next time as well.

On a related note, I do like technology which allows you to visualize inherently non-visual information. To that end C-span has a debate hub which shows all sorts of useless statistics to help you decide who won the debate based on statistics like which candidate used which words most. (So let’s see, Obama is winning in Afghanistan but McCain is winning in Iraq. How did they do with runners in scoring position?)