Aside from mock civility between Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, the insincerity of which was so thick that a professional grade chainsaw would have to employed to have the faintest hope of cutting it, there was nothing of any real note in tonight’s Democratic Party debate. Brian Williams and Tim Russert could just as easily have phoned in their inane and useless questions about campaign tactics. Both of these “hard hitting” journalists appear to have left the pads in the locker room in favor of a light workout. Policy questions revealed that the only real difference between the Obama and Clinton platforms, even the much vaunted health care issue, was the color of the fringe around the edges. In other words there wasn’t any real difference. Hillary’s approach to health care may be less disingenuous than Barak’s because Hillary admits her’s is a “gun in the back” approach. Barak’s approach makes the phony appeal to “choice.”
The howler of the evening came when Obama explained that since he had been a constitutional law professor he understood the impact certain policies probably better than anyone else. This raised an idea for a new party game. Find the saltiest chips you can buy and make sure no one has had anything to drink. A list of Barak Obama’s campaign proposals (or Hillary’s or McCain’s or Huckabee’s, for that matter) are given to each player. Each player must read a proposal and then look for the authority to implement that policy in the Constitution. Any player failing to find the authority in the Constitution must eat a handful of chips. No one can drink anything unless they can find a clear constitutional authority for the candidate in question’s proposals. It’s a lead pipe cinch that the gamers will be demanding the suspension (if they can muster enough saliva to actually wet their puckered lips and croak out their demands) of the game by the third round.
Totally appropos of nothing, it appeared that MSNBC dedicated a soft-focus camera for Hillary. It also appears that her handlers made sure that theatrical makeup was applied…ahem…liberally (meaning with a trowel) and she was warned to keep her facial muscle movements to a minimum to avoid re-exposing the crevasses they had artfully concealed.
The bottom line is that Hillary needed to hit a home run in order to right the sinking ship of her campaign in Ohio and Texas, and consequently the US. Barak just needed to appear to not be mean to the girl. She whiffed. He didn’t.
Overall, this “debate” was a gross waste of time. Except for the idea for the party game, maybe.