First Presidential Debate 9/27/08

I watched last night's debate "with" a group of mostly liberals, connected via Twitter. It was an interesting and sometimes hilarious experience. I also followed the live blogging of Nate Silver and Sean Quinn at fivethirtyeight.com. I took notes, in a blog-city compose window. For post-debate commentary, I followed both CNN and MSNBC into the wee hours. Despite the highly entertaining Twitter experience, I came away thinking the debate was pretty much a yawner and that Obama was too deferential, missing many chances to go in for the kill, so to speak.

Shows how much I know. According to the polls as they begin to come in, this was a big win for Obama. Apparently, voters were offended by McCain's dismissiveness, his refusal (inability?) to even look at Obama. Quoting Pollmeister Nate Silver's post today entitled Why Voters thought Obama Won:

TPM has the internals of the CNN poll of debate-watchers, which had Obama winning overall by a margin of 51-38. The poll suggests that Obama is opening up a gap on connectedness, while closing a gap on readiness.

Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you”. This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually speaking to middle class voters. Per the transcript, McCain never once mentioned the phrase “middle class” (Obama did so three times). And Obama’s eye contact was directly with the camera, i.e. the voters at home. McCain seemed to be speaking literally to the people in the room in Mississippi, but figuratively to the punditry. It is no surprise that a small majority of pundits seemed to have thought that McCain won, even when the polls indicated otherwise; the pundits were his target audience.

Looking back through my notes, I see one issue that I haven't heard covered elsewhere, and it fits perfectly into this theme that seems to he hitting home as Obama effectively communicates his connection with average folks, and McCain slips further and further into the ethereal realm of the very rich who haven't a clue (where he so clearly belongs). It came in response to Lehrer's last effort to get the candidates to tell the audience what they would cut from their proposals to accommodate for the huge cost of covering the bad debts of financial institutions run wild. Obama concluded his answer with (from the transcript):

The only point I want to make is this, that in order to make the tough decisions we have to know what our values are and who we're fighting for and our priorities and if we are spending $300 billion on tax cuts for people who don't need them and weren't even asking for them, and we are leaving out health care which is crushing on people all across the country, then I think we have made a bad decision and I want to make sure we're not shortchanging our long term priorities.

To which McCain answered (from the transcript):

Well, I want to make sure we're not handing the health care system over to the federal government which is basically what would ultimately happen with Senator Obama's health care plan. I want the families to make decisions between themselves and their doctors. Not the federal government.

He really doesn't understand. He thinks that average people make health care decisions "between themselves and their doctors." That's just silly and disconnected and downright naive. Middle class people haven't been making medical decisions that way since Reaganomics kicked in. Insurance companies make all the medical decisions for the average people who're lucky enough to have health coverage. It's almost quaint, this notion of folks and their doctors making health care decisions, sometimes life and death ones, and John McCain really DOES NOT KNOW that it doesn't work that way anymore, that it hasn't worked that way in a long time, not for most of us. Our doctors will do what the insurers will at least partially cover, and those of us lucky enough to have enough coverage to allow us access to treatment will undoubtedly, in the wake of any serious illness, be faced with a huge burden of debt comprised of uncovered illness-related expenses.

It's even worse for the forty-seven million Americans without private health insurance (say it out loud, look at it as many ways as you can think of... 47,000,000 people), because without it you can't get care. You get sick, or you have vague symptoms, think you might be sick, and you can't go to the doctor. They won't take you. All you have is the emergency room, so you tough it out, try to ignore it, until it becomes too acute to ignore and they'll see you in the emergency room. Forty-seven million Americans. Our national shame.

What I don't understand is why they care so much. Putting in place some kind of safety net for the uninsured so that everyone can get help when they're hurt or sick won't take anything away from the wealthy. They'll still be able to make all their medical "decisions between themselves and their doctors," just like they always have. Especially those who call themselves Christian Conservatives who also oppose any kind of safety net healthcare system. There's nothing Christian at all about denying 47,000,000 American citizens, many of them working families, access to basic medical services. Nothing.

As if that's not awful enough, there's salt to pour in the wound. Obama touched on it in last night's debate but not emphatically enough. I think it needs to be shouted from the rooftops. McCain doesn't just want to prevent access to medical care, he wants to take away some of what little there is. Mike King writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

In the campaign of 2008, McCain proposes to go even further. He wants to eliminate the tax exemption workers get for the health benefits their employers provide. In its place, he would enact tax credits of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to help them buy insurance on their own.

While the decades-old system of employer-sponsored health insurance has its shortcomings — many small businesses can’t afford to offer it — killing the tax exemption will lead to a stampede of large employers discontinuing their more affordable, group health plans. Those comprehensive plans cost more than $12,000 a year for the average family; with a tax credit of just $5,000, they’d be left to find $7,000 a year to buy comparable coverage. Put simply, the tax-credit scheme won’t work.

Huh? It's appalling. McCain doesn't get it, hasn't got a clue. Judging by today's polls, maybe the American people finally do. That's why we have these debates.