A Debate in Oxford (Mississippi)

I've stayed up way past my bedtime and watched the first presidential debates between John McCain and Barack Obama, in a live webcast on CBS's website. Before I go to sleep, here are my impressions:

It was a fairly good debate, where salient criticisms were politely and effectively exchanged, and where the two of them did actually listen to each other and address each other's points understandingly, which is much more, I'd say, than has happened in any debate where Bush was involved. So the evolutionary trend of America's presidents will apparently be shifting not further toward homo habilis (or, as the comedian Lewis Black suggested, plants) but up toward homo sapiens again.

But I was disappointed in Obama, because he mostly spoke in a halting manner, so that it was quite evident that he had memorized sentences beforehand and was trying to remember them; I wish that he had spoken in his own extempore words from the beginning. It would have been far better if he had prepared for the debates by holding practice discussions with, let's say, campaign members, and tested in that manner whether he knew the important facts and figures and could counter the crucial criticisms. On the other hand, he delivered the prepared lines with conviction, which is more than Sarah Palin did in her interview with Katie Couric. Besides, by the end he was more spontaneous.

Then, of course, he made statements I disagreed with, especially that Russia should leave South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Those regions have, after all, been autonomous since 1992, and while I admit that the Russian government has been doing its best to bring them under its sphere of influence, I do not think that its presence runs counter to the wishes of the majority of the population, though at the same time the safety of the Georgian citizens should certainly be safeguarded. Besides, the question of national identity there is certainly complex and unresolved, and should not be imposed from the outside (by governments, for instance, who assign those regions exclusively and irrevocably to Georgia) but left to be resolved by plebiscite or some other form of regional decision-making. An enormous shortcoming of the present US foreign policy is, I think, its utter inability to be neutral in any situation abroad. Bill Clinton wanted humanitarian crises to be brought to a generally acceptable resolution; George W. Bush wants humanitarian crises to be brought to a resolution if, and only if, that resolution is wholly favourable to the side that is in the pocket of the US military/CIA. This policy is clearly at the expense of every person (not only on the "opposing" but also the "allied" side, I would argue) who is truly affected by the crises, and I do not want Barack Obama to continue on that course.

Then there was the wince-inducing exchange where McCain talked about receiving the bracelet of a dead soldier from a mother who said that she didn't want her son to have died in vain (= the war in Iraq should be brought to a "victorious" conclusion) and then Obama countered with his own tale of receiving a bracelet. Simply awful, and embarrassing.

Obama's pronouncements on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, etc., and even on supporting missile defense (by which I think he does mean this idea that missiles can strike each other out of the air, never mind that 2 out of 3 trials of such manoeuvres have failed) are a whole new kettle of fish that I don't want to get into here. At least, I guess, he stressed that he would try to raise America's standing in the world by living up to its ideals, and even sincerely acknowledged McCain for his work against torture. And when he said (in a long argument about meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, etc.) that he would sit down and talk, without preconditions, with anyone if this would improve the security of America, his position was reasonable and, I thought, unassailable.

But John McCain deeply irritated me. His condescending folksy phraseology, which is really getting shopworn after the decades he has used it, and his air of deprecatory and disappointed conscious rectitude — of being the tired, unfairly martyred, noble leader of a principled forlorn hope — really, really set my teeth on edge. I can't bear the thought of having to listen to him and Palin for the next four years. Besides, he does not seem in the best physical form, and seemed to me to be swaying back and forth a little at the podium. There can be ninety-year-olds who are much sharper and even fitter than me, so I think that criticizing him for his age in itself is shallow and pointless, but, regardless of his age, he does seem neither sharp nor fit, and I have long thought that he is exhausted by the whole affair of running for president, so I don't see how he will be able to get to the end of the four-year term. He invoked Reagan (the oldest president in American history, I think) in an obvious way, but I hope no one will fall for the parallel, and besides I was totally baffled, not to mention angry, when he said that Reagan's SDI (or "Star Wars") brought an end to the Cold War. On the plus side, he did speak out strongly against torture and, in passing, Guantánamo Bay.

What I liked very much about Obama is that he smiled genuinely (often at the moderator, in the touchingly confiding, unselfconscious way that a child who knows that another child is talking nonsense, but patiently and quietly listens because he doesn't want to be rude, might smile at an onlooking parent) when McCain was querulously countering his arguments or making a remark that did not quite make sense or scoring a hit. His air was often charmingly respectful and attentive, and he was in control of the situation more than McCain, who tended to come across as peevish and unamiable, and I liked the way that he warmed up to the debate and even apparently enjoyed it — not pedantically, either.

Lastly, I will mention that I was happy with Jim Lehrer, the moderator. He was self-effacing and generous in letting the candidates talk freely, and evidently interested in what they had to say. Altogether I like him anyway, as he is incredibly free of conceit, and is one of those interviewers who seem to have an endearingly naïve trust in the good and admirable qualities all the public figures with whom they come into contact, no matter how vile and small-souled those people really are and how ineffably stupid their ideas.

In the end, despite all the shortcomings, I was left with a feeling of Hope.

P.S.: I do not like the new Pakistani president. I'm sorry that this statement is not more profound, but I really don't. He is in the typical cast of slimy, self-satisfied politicians, free of any inconvenient moral convictions whatsoever, who have proliferated in countries from Antigua and Barbuda to Zimbabwe since the dawn of time; and the thought of him as the ambassador of democracy and "western ideals" to Pakistan causes me to shudder for all of us. His hobbing and nobbing in New York right after the bombing of the Marriott Hotel, or his discomfiting remarks that Sarah Palin is "gorgeous" and something about hugging her (at which point she was, to my pleased surprise, decent enough not to look fatuously flattered, but ill at ease), are only the tip of the iceberg.