No-Fight Night: Town Hall Debate Sticks to the Issues

In the days before the second presidential debate on Tuesday, much of the anticipation was whether the 80 undecided voters seated around the candidates would witness a town-hall forum or a steel-cage match.

With just a month to go until Election Day, the race has turned increasingly negative. On the campaign trail, Republican VP contender Sarah Palin repeatedly denounced Democrat Obama for “palling around with terrorists” because of his association with former ‘60s radical Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol during the Vietnam War era.

The Obama camp hit back by resurrecting, in a 13-minute documentary, McCain’s part in the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s.

McCain entered the Tuesday night contest at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., having lost ground in the polls, and at least one BU blogger was impatient for him to make more pointed attacks on Obama.

“It suddenly occurred me just how much effort I and other conservative bloggers have been going through to defend McCain and Palin, expose Obama’s hateful dictatorial tendencies, and detail the historical unfairness of this 2008 election coverage,” wrote September 11 Republican. “Shouldn’t John McCain be leading this charge? If it’s not the job of the Republican nominee to criticize the Democratic nominee and his allies, whose job is it?”

But neither candidate opted for all-out attack on Tuesday. And judging by the questions, the viewers were hungrier for policy meat than for partisan mud. The candidates largely obliged.

Instead of coming out swinging, McCain tried to shake things up with a new policy proposal, a $300 billion plan to buy up mortgages from struggling homeowners, and in essence, refinance them at lower cost.   

“It’s my proposal; it’s not Senator Obama’s proposal; it’s not President Bush’s proposal,” said McCain. “I know how to get America working again, restore our economy, and take care of working Americans.”

The folks over at This Is My Party applauded the idea. “McCain is laying out a much more comprehensive economic plan than Obama did, dealing with all sectors that affect the economy, not just some quick touch-and-go love to the middle class. He also did a good job distinguishing himself from President Bush.”

But the Buck Stop was unimpressed and saw the proposal as evidence of the Republican’s “incoherent’ agenda.

“McCain’s proposal for the government to buy up mortgages doesn’t square with the antigovernment Reaganism he was espousing for the other hour and 29 minutes of the debate,” he wrote.

Each candidate tried to tar the other for the current economic crisis. McCain blasted Obama and his “cronies” for supporting the home-loan excesses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Obama said the root cause of the crisis was free markets gone wild, a philosophy he attached to Bush and McCain.

The sparring continued over the best way to deal with the threat of Iran and with Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists hiding out in Pakistan’s remote tribal region on the Afghanistan border.

But domestic issues ruled the night, with one voter asking via the Internet what sacrifices Americans might need to make to “help restore the American dream and to get out of the economic morass that we’re now in.” McCain suggested an across-the-board government spending freeze (except for defense, veterans affairs, and “some other vital programs”). Obama talked about energy conservation and a “volunteer corps … so that military families and our troops are not the only ones bearing the burden of renewing America.”

If appearances matter at presidential debates, Obama had the edge, according to Good People Better Rise Up. Let me be blunt here,” he wrote. “Standing next to Obama, or worse, walking around a stage with him, McCain looks old. But much, much more importantly: He talks old. KGB? Reagan? Lebanon? Tip O’Neill? Reagan? Soviet Union? Teddy Roosevelt? Reagan? Are you kidding me? Running against another 20th-century candidate, that might have had some traction. But against a guy like Obama? In the middle of a 21st-century economic meltdown?”

Still, on the issues, This Is My Party gave the win to McCain. “Neither candidate scored a knockout, but McCain won on points,” he wrote. “Obama stumbled a little on foreign policy questions (especially on Russia and Israel). McCain didn’t stumble on the economy or health care.”

It was hard to tell if any of the undecided voters in the audience, stone-faced throughout, was won over. One BU blogger, I Don’t Think I Know, could understand why. “These debates don’t force the candidates to go into a lengthy, in-depth, back-and-forth discussion on most of the issues,” he wrote. “So the viewer rarely gets enough information to change their stance on any particular issue.”

Chris Berdik can be reached at cberdik@bu.edu.