Idea IS the format

Even as Tom Brokaw was welcoming the two presidential candidates to the floor of the debating hall at Belmont University, Nashville, it was obvious how little all three men wanted to be there, let alone in the company of each other.

The ‘town hall’ format, whereby the candidates take questions from an intimate audience of constituents, is supposed to be John McCain’s forte.  How important then, with his campaign floundering, that McCain take this opportunity to reassert himself in the race?

Above all things, McCain needed presence in this debate. He needed to appear strong like an ox, sharp as a whip, ready to sweep aside a man thirty years his junior.

For the first fifteen minutes, this format didn’t look like anybody’s forte, especially Brokaw, who became cantankerous as soon as it became clear that it took more than a little red light to stop a pair of politicians from talking for as long as they fucking well liked.

It was only a matter of time, however, before the discussion strayed onto something that could be considered an ‘issue’, and that issue was health. Obama was the big winner here, on the strength of nothing more than the assertion that free health care was a right rather than a privilege. McCain, unsurprisingly, took a more conservative position.

As the debate wore on, McCain took on the air of the kid at school who nobody likes, and likes even less for the fact that they make such clumsy attempts to ingratiate themselves with anyone and everyone.

He began sucking up to Brokaw on the increasingly contentious issue of timekeeping, and cracked jokes about hair loss with an audience who, even under the scrutiny of fifty million people, couldn’t even manage a polite laugh.  (His joke is rendered even less amusing by the knowledge that he once called his wife Cindy a “cunt” in front of a group of reporters after she poked fun at his balding pate.) When Obama spoke, McCain ambled around the stage, muttering to himself and blocking the camera’s view. For a while the second of the three presidential debates was starting to look like a really awful amateur theatrical production of Rain Man.

Shrugging off the fact that he was dying on his arse, McCain persisted with his attempts to persuade himself, if nobody else, that he shares some natural affinity with thinking members of the American electorate. “My friends,” he implored, every time he addressed himself to his audience, before embarking on yet another half-baked attempt to discredit his opponents policies or track record. The more he said it, the more hollow it sounded.

If there was an area of this debate where McCain managed to gain any traction, it was in the discussion of foreign policy. Sadly for the G.O.P. it was still Obama who dealt the most telling blow here, reminding us of his opposite number’s essentially bellicose tendencies, not to mention his highly questionable judgement. McCain’s military history ought to be one of his greatest assets in this election, but the voters he is trying to win over are tired of war, and tired of war-mongers.

Obama remained aloof throughout, taking issue on the points that mattered, conspicuously quiet on the ones that didn’t. He was a long way from his best – a long way – but ‘that one’ (as McCain at one stage referred to him) still looked like the Energiser bunny in comparison to ‘the other one’.  As his age starts to catch up with him and the polls continue to get away from him, we could be about to see John McCain unravel completely over the next twenty-six days.

Just so long as the crazy ol’ bastard isn’t elected President at the end of it.

So it began, the battle for middle America. Senator Joseph Biden flashed a smile of assent, and moved to his podium. Sarah Palin looked confident, assured, enthusiastic, a long way from the nervous wreck she ought to have been. Whoever pepped her up for this pep rally, they did a damn good job.

Biden and I weren’t the only people worried about falling under her spell.

Others had already succumbed. I’m talking about the kind of wholesome, patriotic, all-Americans she’s been selected to hold a mirror up to. Except that hers is a special mirror, one that only reflects their better angels, against the backdrop of a country occasionally glimpsed in their wholesome, patriotic, all-American dreams.

Even those of us on foreign shores probably see in Palin a flash of something we’d like to believe in, of a nation founded on hard work and good intentions. We certainly voted with our feet on Thursday night, making up what was (allowing for internet audiences as well as the 69.9million viewers who tuned in in the US) the most watched debate of all time, vice-presidential or otherwise. And rightly so. Anybody thinking they won’t be affected by the outcome of this election would need to have left planet Earth some time ago.

That being the case, the result of the election may still be decided by a few hundred thousand people, in each of half a dozen states. These are the people for whom Palin is positioned as a natural friend, confidante and kindred spirit, someone who sits around a kitchen table bearing the weight of the same concerns on her broad, maternal shoulders.

This, of course, is bullshit.

The reality is that she’s the worst of both worlds, with more skeletons in her closet than your average Stepford wife, yet the vanity to have been persuaded that she should be just a heartbeat away from running the country. This, on the strength of having done little more than muddle her way through the same challenges many of us face trying to keep control of our cut-throat careers and fucked-up family lives.

It took only a few well-chosen words for Joe Biden to remind us that Sarah Palin has by no means a monopoly on hardship and adversity, or on the tenacity required to turn these to your advantage. On the contrary, Biden gives us a glimpse of a life less ordinary, delivered with a candour and honesty far less contrived than that of his opponent. He looks like a man who’s learnt enough things the hard way to be tasked with making decisions on behalf of others. He gives us the credit for having been around the block a few times ourselves.

Biden’s was a message of hope and encouragement, acknowledging the epochal importance of this election, and unchallenged in bestowing a damning verdict upon the last eight years. It was as much as Palin could do to keep distance between her ticket and the many manifest policy failures of the incumbent administration.

And, despite all her ’say it ain’t so, Joe’ protestations, it was Palin who ultimately invoked the message of fear and intimidation so fundamental to the Bush Doctrine, reasserting the facile and insidious mantra that it is the essential liberty of the American people that gains them so many enemies overseas.

It looks ever more as though only fear can win this battle now for John McCain. I’m talking about the fear that flows as an undercurrent through American society, occasionally swelling to the surface and erupting into outrage when a certain type of pressure is applied. This is the fear that can divide a nation along the fault-lines of race, religion and economic viability. This is the fear that still grips a significant proportion of the electorate when they consider voting for Barack Obama. Perhaps this is the fear that he will actually deliver on the promise of change, and that there will be no place for them in his America, a country unified by hope, and given strength in self-belief.

Whatever the case, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. As the momentum shifts left, the more authoritarian McCain’s candidacy can be expected to become, bullying the media and smearing and discrediting his opponents. Expect the rhetoric of intimidation, tapping ever deeper into these fears and anxieties, sugar-coated with the folksy familiarity, unblinking loyalty and saccharine certitude of his supposedly home-baked running mate. She has shown us, at the very least, that she can be well programmed.

But then again, I’m just a blogger.

What the fuck do I know?

When news breaks on Twitter’s election channel, you get more than just the facts.

That’s how I heard that the GOP had just given up any attempt to turn the great state of Michigan red come November 5th 2008.

They’ll tell you that it wasn’t a key state for them, but it must have mattered enough for them to decide that it was worth spending some money there in the first place.

And that’s part of the problem, right there. By accepting matching funds, McCain is having to deal with the campaign spending restrictions that go with them. If he needs to spend more fighting battles in supposedly safer states like Indiana and Virginia – and he does – he has to start cutting losses elsewhere. Even Rove can’t spin that to make it look like a good thing.

Meanwhile the Obama camp, having eschewed federal assistance, are now free to spend as much as they can raise. They were busy launching an Obama ‘08 iPhone application. Might sound like a gimmick, but Twitter quickly came alive with positive feedback, reporting that the app makes smart use of the iPhone platform to engender greater awareness of Barack Obama’s.

All of this just a few hours ahead of the vice-presidential debate, and a chance for Sarah Palin to stop haemmoraging credibility (or, according to one CNN closed caption, ‘edibility’) after a week in virtual freefall. The sense of anticipation on Twitter was palpable, with the left-leaning crowd quivering at the prospect of yet another own-goal from the free-scoring hockey mom.

At the same time, some armchair commentators were counselling caution, noting that Palin’s currency had nowhere to go but up. Her performance would need to be little more than polysyllabic to be championed – on Fox News at least – as a shock victory for the little guy.

Let’s get it straight right now. News 24 is for wimps. I’ve been mainlining this Twitter shit for days, carried through the veins of netroots political activism, pure, uncut, 100% District of Columbian.

My iPhone sits here, like a drip, feeding it to me intravenously, a steady unrelenting trickle of quips, commentary and outright provocation, filling me with the lifeblood of a good old-fashioned down and dirty god damn important presidential election campaign.

And the best thing about it? Well, every now and then, if you watch closely, and check your sources, you get to see that most wonderful of things.

A pissed-off Republican.