“A Bunch of Gummy Meanderings” — The Presidential Debates in Light of the Current Reality
Oct 10th, 2008 by admin
“Both campaigns, in the closing stretch, seem not fully worthy of the moment. We are in crisis — a once-in-a-century event, as we now say. And what we got from the candidates, in this week’s presidential debate, was a bunch of gummy meanderings — smooth, rounded sentences so full of focus-grouped inanities that six minutes in viewers entered a kind of trance in which we almost immediately gave up on trying to wrest meaning from what was being said and instead focused on mere impressions. The look of things. The men on the plane, the pseudo-tough political operatives who surround both candidates, sometimes grouse, in private, that it’s all symbols now, all mood, all about the visual.
But they have some real responsibility here. They send their candidates out to speak such thin gruel, such spat-out porridge, that we are struck dumb, and left daydreaming about the fact that Mr. Obama’s suits are always slate gray and never seem to wrinkle, and Mr. McCain tonight seems like a rabbity forest creature darting amid the hedgerows.
Why would anyone trust either candidate to help dig us out of this if they can’t speak frankly about what got us into it?”
Read the rest of Peggy Noonan’s exquisitely-crafted response to the Presidential debates from this morning’s Wall Street Journal. H/t to World Can’t Wait which also gets the credit for the image up there.
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