the citizen-viewer

The second presidential debate just ended. I don’t know why Tom Brokaw was trying to keep track of time. Let it run out, that was boring. I read somewhere else that neither Obama nor McCain is a good debater. That was true tonight. Switching the question to one of your own is all fine and dandy, expect that on a few of them I really would have preferred a straight answer. Especially to the guy who asked how the bailout was actually going to affect non-Wall Street America.

It also lacked the tension of the earlier debates. I think that’s a reflection of Obama’s big lead. Obama didn’t let any of McCain’s hits go by and McCain was a windmill of punches, but neither of them seem that revved up about it. McCain seems like he wants to avoid being called a quitter. Obama just wants to hold onto the lead. All the sports metaphors in the world though won’t make up for the facts that they repeated what they’d already said, and that on the issue of the day, they need to come up with more.

Obama, whatever his faults, kept it sane and vaguely reasonable: Invest in alternative energy, conserve energy (although that was in code), shore up income security with health care, retirement and housing assistance and stay out of military adventures. McCain wants to do “whatever is necessary” abroad and cut Medicare and Social Security at home, although he didn’t say how.

One new thing I hadn’t heard: McCain’s plan to renegotiate individual mortgages. Would that work?

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias explains:
“I heard a certain amount of talk on the CNN post-game commentary to the effect that McCain had some kind of new plan to buy home mortgage debt and help restructure loans. This isn’t a new plan at all, it’s a description of provisions in last week’s rescue package.

UPDATE: To clarify, the emergency package grants the Treasury Department the authority to do more-or-less what McCain proposed, something progressive legislators pushed to include in the package. People didn’t discuss it much because the general understanding is that Secretary Paulson “doesn’t favor taking those steps.”