Post-debate thoughts

Lots of posts coming, in random order.

Last night was the second CNN/YouTube debate. I got some pretty good seats, and was at the edge of the area they were showing a lot on TV, which means I might have been on screen for a bit, but it also meant we had lights shining in our eyes a lot.

Highlight:
I was about 5 feet away from CHUCK NORRIS! Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet him and he didn’t come to the Google/YouTube party after the debate. Regardless, it was exciting.

As you may know, Norris recently endorsed Mike Huckabee:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDUQW8LUMs8

The debate was.. interesting. It was weird: some actual debate broke out a couple of times. Additionally, this debate was far rougher than the Democratic one. Not just the candidates, but the crowd was really tough, booing when they didn’t like an answer, yelling things sometimes. A lot of that was from Ron Paul’s crew, I think, but I’ll post about that separately.

I thought that the questions were generally good. The answers ranged from good to terrible, I think. My least favorite was Rudy’s answer to “What should we do to repair the image of America in the Middle East?”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noLw6KpgTaQ

You can watch the rest of the questions and responses here.

The amount of Hillary-bashing the candidates did surprised me. She was a punching bag for a lot of the candidates. I’m not a big Hillary fan, but I found this to be excessive and wasteful. I thought about it afterward and realized that this may have been fueled by the tough crowd. Hillary-bashing was the one thing they all could agree on, so candidates use that to get applause and support from the audience.

As part of the debate, each campaign is asked to submit a short “youtube-style” video from their campaign to be played around commercial breaks. At the Democratic debate, it was quite clear which campaigns knew what “youtube-style” meant and which didn’t (some just submitted campaign commercials, which wasn’t the point). I expected the Republicans to learn from this, but they didn’t. Rudy’s was the best, as it was at least tongue-in-cheek in part, but none of them were youtube-style, which was disappointing. Thompson played an attack ad in that spot, which was pretty awkward and was a poor decision.

Getting on the plane soon, more posts to follow…