sprignaturemoves.com

I took some notes during the debates.

Republican side

• Romney was very defensive and serious — too much of both. He’s going to end up like Michael Bloomberg, out of touch with normal people because of all of his money. I think he hurt his chances in this debate.
• Thompson was funny and intimidating — there’s something about that voice of his.
• Ron Paul …hmmm.. He didn’t sound like a Republican at all. He’s too different/extreme to get the nomination. It’s too bad that he is running as a Republican because he has a enough steam with younger people (at least according the Facebook) to take votes away from the more realistic candidates.
• Huckabee was pretty down to earth. I wonder about how he would handle a crisis.
• Guliani was well-spoken and articulate, but stuck on 9/11.
• McCain stayed out of most most everything. He carried the big stick of experience and perspective. The question with McCain: is he too closely aligned with Bush? He took some jabs from Romney about immigration. Really, people. Can we deport all illegal immigrants, realistically? McCain’s plan seems more realistic than other’s I’ve heard.

Democratic side

Oh, boy, where do I start. It’s pretty dang scary to me that one of these candidates could be the leader of the Free World. Yikes.

• The best line of the night for me was when Hillary said “let’s have a reality break?” I laughed. I don’t think it’s what she mean — you know — breaking from reality and all, but based on the talk leading up to that comment, there wasn’t much reality in it.
• The thing that I don’t get is this: The war in Iraq has cost taxpayers how many billions? And, what , socialized medicine is going to not cost taxpayers billions? Right.
• There was a lot more spouting off, stump speech snippents and not answering Gibson’s questions in the Democrat debate.
• I’m better, no I’m better, I can change better than you. No, you can’t. Yes, I can. Blah, blah, blah. Normal people are annoyed by this.
• Nothing was quite as scary to me as the foreign policy talk — especially Richardson’s pulling all of the troops out in 6 months. I think that’s an extreme and shortsighted view that is not realistic. I give Hillary some credit for at least being realistic about how to get the troops out of Iraq.
• Seems obvious to me that our military will get gutted, ala Bill Clinton, if anyone of these candidates gets elected.
• I’m tired of the Bush-bashing. He’s an easy target. That tactic is tired and dumb — “the failed policies of the Bush administration.” Come up with some realistic ideas of your own. I’m not sure that any of these chumps would have handled the tough things better than Bush has during his presidency.
• Stopping the special interest groups is “extraordinarily personal” to Edwards. That’s nice. There goes all of his funding.
• Hillary was way too overbearing, fatheaded and mean sounding. People don’t like it.
• Program after program after program after program after program after program. Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching…
• I thought Edwards spent the whole debate trying to have the biggest quote of the night.
• I thought it was awesome that Edwards and Obama teamed up on Hillary, especially Edwards comments about Hillary taking third in Iowa.

General thoughts

• I know ABC is biased toward the liberal side, so it makes me wonder why the Republican debate was shown first. Having the Democratic debate second makes it the one that sticks in peoples minds. Don’t think that was quite fair.
• The commercials during this debate were ridiculous. Serenity Underwear, Rogaine foam, Flomax and Mucus and Congestion Alka-Seltzer. The list goes on.
• The Facebook hype was dumb. The choices for the most surprising moment in the Republican debate left something to be desired. I was on Facebook during the debate and most of the data the “correspondent” read didn’t match the majority of what was being shown — at least in the status update thing in the right column.

In case you missed the debates, there they are on Youtube: