I just came back from the gym where two guys were casually discussing who they thought had the edge in the debate. This shocked me but not half as much as the shock I felt when i read the piece by my esteemed and beloved Ms. Ephron about the reaction her group had to the evening. .
In my mind, there were two separate but equal versions of the debate going on simultaneously. And Barack Obama won them both.
Obviously there was the verbal debate. Call me crazy but I am still deeply thrilled by the way Barack Obama constructs arguments full of sentences that contain logic and deductive reasoning .In my opinion, he is so easy to follow because he is deep inside of his own content when he speaks. He believes in and understands what he is saying. What a relief.
Not so, John McCaiin. who sputters and circles and loses track of a lot of his points in a way that kind of reminds me of that poor Miss Teen South Carolina from last year who hoped that if she just kept talking about "U.S Americans" and throwing in the phrase "and such as" she would finally wind up near a group of words that contained a real thought.
For at least half of the debate I felt like I was watching John McCain stumbling through the woods, searching for a trail of breadcrumbs that would lead him back to the comforts of "pork barrel spending" and "earmarks." (And this despite the fact that his enraging running mate ran up $198 million in earmarks and pork barrel spending as Governor of Alaska. It drives me absolutely crazy when someone's political platform has no internal consistency. So don't get me started on her.)
But now lets discuss the OTHER debate: The non verbal portion of the proceedings, the one that took place during all those reaction shots of McCain behind the podium, when he couldn't even look at Barack Obama. This was by far the scarier of the two debates. It worries me that not everyone gives as much credence to stuff like this as I do. But in the last election, that Banty Rooster routine that George W . Bush put on display while he was debating John Kerrey (and Gore before him) contained every last thing you needed to know about the way he would conduct his administration for the whole 8 years . It was all right there in the way he stood and the way he moved: the arrogance, the lack of humility, the foolishness, the inability to compromise, the self deception.
Tonight it was the body language of John McCain while Barack Obama was speaking that had me riveted and mortified. Almost immediately we saw him turn in to America's weird old sputtering overly emotional uncle ; all red in the face and trying to hide behind a singularly grotesque fake cover up smile that perhaps someone taught him to use in an anger management class. As he stood behind his podium and waited for Barack Obama to finish, McCain sometimes seemed so unable to conceal his rage that I thought I was watching a weird Bill Plymptom cartoon of McCain's face morphing in to a tea kettle, with a rattling lid and steam coming out his ears. Every time McCain mentioned "reaching across the aisle," I thought "To do what? Grab someone by their throat and shake them til their eyeballs pop out of their head?"
It is deeply disturbing to think that a man with John McCain's temperament might be put in charge of delicate diplomatic negotiations with the insane dictators and out of control narcissists who head the countries that scare us .
And with so much undisguised rage boiling in side of him, he could easily succumb to an illness during his term . It really isn't hard to imagine. So now I am going to end this diatribe before I am forced to give more thought to that person he selected to take over the fate the free world were something to happen to him.
People: Listen to me. I was completely right about that damn Banty Rooster thing. Sometimes its the silences that speak the loudest.
