We were driving through central Wisconsin during the debate last night. My car’s stereo has developed extremely poor reception. We couldn’t pull in any stations that were covering the debate. So I called up my sister, “Hey, can you put your phone up to the speaker? My stereo isn’t working.” So we drove for about 15 minutes listening to my cell phone on speaker.” That was pretty hard to hear, so Sonja asked if we could connect to the internet on the laptop via the phone. Why, yes, I think we can.<\/p>\n
So, driving across central wisconsin, we had the computer using the phone as a bluetooth modem, streaming the debate live from mpr.org, with the headphone output plugged in to a tape adapter in the car.<\/p>\n
We caught most of the second half of the debate, and we pulled into the parking lot of a coffee shop to quickly synchronize Google Reader. My initial impression, listening to the debate, was that although Obama was clear, thoughtful, and intelligent, I worried that McCain would be viewed as having “won” the debate. He certainly sounded visceral, aggressive tone on the radio.<\/p>\n
After we got unpacked, I opened the laptop again to read through some of the debate reactions. Talking Points Memo and Andrew Sullivan seemed to be more favorable towards Obama than I initally thought. The nytimes article I read was very balanced. Even Fox seemed to think it was basically a draw.<\/p>\n
Finally, today, I was able to download a video of highlights from the debate. What a difference seeing the video vs. just hearing it on the radio. Obama looked serious, forceful, very presidential. McCain wouldn’t even look him in the eye! Obama caught him on a number of moments that McCain had obviously hoped to own. The soldier’s bracelet and also the “naivete” lines that McCain had hoped to bag were upstaged by Obama’s comebacks.<\/p>\n
So, I’m feeling pretty good now, going into thursday’s VP debate. (Did you see palin on Katie Couric’s show? Wow.) Obama’s team will have learned a few things about how to deal with McCain, and I think that Obama has clearly made great strides as a debater since earlier on in this process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We were driving through central Wisconsin during the debate last night. My car’s stereo has developed extremely poor reception. We couldn’t pull in any stations that were covering the debate. So I called up my sister, “Hey, can you put your phone up to the speaker? My stereo isn’t working.” So we drove for about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pf4VN-gi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1011,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}