Joe the Plumber? Try John the Blinker.
When she was asked by Charles Gibson of CBS news if she had paused even for a moment to consider whether she was experienced enough to run as McCain’s VP, Sarah Palin famously told him “no, because you can’t blink”. You can wink, of course, by all means, wink away, but you can’t blink. That’s all well and good, but somebody should have told John McCain.
Here’s a little slice of the Blinkmeister in action:
By my reckoning McCain blinks 57 times in just 28 seconds. That’s more than twice a second. On that basis, he would have blinked a total of 7,332 times through the course of last night’s hour-long debate. (By contrast, Obama can be seen here blinking just 20 times. That puts him at a mere 2,571 blinks overall. Compared to McCain, Obama’s catching flies on his eyeballs. He’s like a bush-baby on crystal meth. The man is certainly not blinking every 0.491 seconds, not like Blinky McBlinkster over there.)
Stay with me on this. A normal person under no undue pressure blink just 960 times in an hour. Opinions appear divided on whether rapid blinking is evidence that the somebody is trying to be deceitful, but it seems to be more widely accepted that “to assess mental stress, especially in a social situation, blinking is supposed to be one of the more reliable biological measurements.” McCain certainly appeared to be undergoing a certain amount of mental stress.
Not only did McCain appear somewhat stressed, but, occasionally, just a little frustrated. One might even say… angry.
It was ironic that McCain was the less composed of the two men, being that Obama was the subject of more frequent slurs on his character. McCain finally dared to level some of the charges his campaign has put to Obama relating to his various ‘associations’.
Obama provided a brief convincing rebuttal of McCain’s smear, then tried to refocus the discussion on his policies. McCain followed his lead, turning his attention to… Obama’s policies. Of course, if you had a platform as makeshift as McCain’s you probably wouldn’t want to stand on it either. Or under it. Or anywhere near it.
With time running out, McCain needed to find the knockout punch from somewhere. Stress was turning to anger, anger to desperation, and eventually desperation turned to… melodrama:
(Of course, to appreciate this you’d probably need to know that this…
…is one of the most viewed videos on Youtube. It’s been watched over 5 million times. Mostly, I’ll wager, by Democrats.)
Obama, meanwhile…
In previous debates, I’ve detected a lot of vitriol directed at John McCain. When I say vitriol, I mean, say, something like this:
Last night, by the end of the debate, a more generous spirit was starting to emerge. As McCain summed up telling us all about the long line of McCains who had served in the army, travelling the world, meeting new and interesting people, and killing them, it was hard not to feel a twinge of pity for the old war-horse. Seeming humble, some might even say broken, he finished by asking the American people to grant him the honour of serving as their President.
Tags: election 08, mccain
