Friday Night Fight: The Verdict

Today we bring you another guest columnist at Political Buzz. Karthika Muthukumaraswamy is a freelance writer in
Philadelphia, PA. She writes about politics, media, science,
and technology. Her specific area of study includes
citizen-media interactions with a focus on new media and
online formats of news delivery.

Often in debates, Barack Obama has been known to be a tad uncomfortable and evasive. He has been accused of being too deliberative in his responses, sometimes talking out loud while mulling over them, and answering in meandering fashion – a fashion that does not conform to the 30-second sound bite, the most effective quantum in presidential horse races. But on Friday night, the junior senator from Illinois defied these charges against him - he was pithy and to the point, calm and collected, effectively making the claim that he was ready to be president.

John McCain, on the other hand, slouched and glowered, sighed and snickered, and never once looked at his Democratic opponent.

I hate to put it down to gestures and posturing, but luckily, I don’t have to. For McCain wasn’t exactly winning on substance either.

If Obama has spent the last few weeks roping McCain in with George Bush on the campaign trail, at the debate, he firmly tied the knot on that relationship. “We [have] to recognize that this is a final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies promoted by George Bush, supported by Senator McCain,” he said in his very first answer to Jim Lehrer’s question on the financial recovery plan.

“Over the last eight years, this administration, along with Senator McCain, have been solely focused on Iraq,” he said, continuing this trend in answer to a foreign policy question. He clinched his arguments by reiterating a series of points made by McCain and the White House about the war, stating that they were wrong on all counts. All McCain could do was shake his head dismissively.

Where Obama did allow McCain a disengagement from Bush and his own advisers was on diplomacy and rogue countries. When McCain chastised Obama for his proposal to meet with leaders of Iran and other hostile nations without precondition, Obama responded calmly that McCain’s own adviser, Henry Kissinger, had stated that “we should meet with Iran -- guess what -- without precondition,” a statement backed by factcheck.org.

McCain’s only retort to that was that he had known Kissinger for 35 years, and he didn’t believe he had said so. What McCain didn’t get was that having known someone or having been somewhere did not immediately increase his credentials for solving world problems (just like looking at a country from your backyard doesn’t enhance your foreign policy expertise). Throughout the debate McCain kept making the point of having been in problem areas. In fact, “I’ve been to insert-failed-state-name-here,” could have been McCain’s talking point of the night. What good is being to a country if it did not improve your judgment about a place and its people, if it didn’t make you more able to deal with the challenges it faces?

His other strategy was to claim that his Democratic rival “doesn't understand" something.

Obama spent years in Indonesia, probably the reason why he could enunciate “Paaak”istan, and Ahmadinejad without flinching. McCain, on the other hand, was almost reminiscent of Bush when he fumbled the Iranian President’s multisyllabic name and got Pakistan’s president wrong, the very country he was claiming to know more about than his rival.

But while Obama met the less likely commander-in-chief test, he did not do enough on the economy, which McCain seized on, by his constant enunciation of “tax cuts” and “spending.” To his credit, he backed up his credentials by mentioning his signature issue, fighting porkbarrel spending. That was also the point where the first of Obama’s much-criticized “agreements” with McCain came. But while both candidates talked about cutting spending, neither specifically named any program they intended to cut. There was a fleeting mention of the DNA of bears in Montana by McCain, because that is always a good thing to bring up on national television. Obama did, however, make the point that he was more in favor of taxing businesses than people, which allowed him to later criticize his rival who didn’t mention the middle class once.

That Obama has matured as a presidential candidate through this election season is undeniable. From often looking peevish when he endured jabs from Hillary Clinton in the primary debates, Obama has gone on to turn around and smile incredulously at the moderator. Which is what he did during a moment Friday when McCain had the gall to compare the Democratic senator to Bush, “You know, we've seen this stubbornness before in this administration to cling to a belief that somehow the surge has not succeeded.” A smile was all that was needed to dispel such obvious malarkey (as Joe Biden would call it).

Obama was also the one that had enough fight in him to interject and interpose even as McCain was making false claims. “That’s not true, John. That’s not true,” he said firmly when McCain stated that Obama had hiked taxes for people making less than $42,000 a year; McCain was wrong, as the New York Times confirms.

Then there was the cooler comeback to McCain’s oft-quoted bracelet story, where he recalled a pledge made to a mother that her son’s sacrifice would not be in vain. “I've got a bracelet, too,” said Obama gravely, and proceeded to tell the American people that he had made the opposite promise to a bereaved mother – to ensure that no other parent would go through such a thing.

While McCain did not commit any major gaffe, neither did he come off as the foreign policy expert he is supposed to be. And with his huffing and puffing, it appeared like he was wishing Obama away. Obama is not going anywhere, and if he continues this way, he might take another edge from John McCain – the one called the Town Hall advantage, at their next meeting.

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