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Weak Town Hall Format Serves No One By: Amy Vedder  |
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 As far as debates go, this one was pretty poor. It wasn’t so much a debate as it was a collection of stump speeches scrunched into two minute responses. The questions were all audience member questions or submitted from people online, but those people weren’t permitted to ask a follow up question, so it really wasn’t the Town Hall format that John McCain is good at.
As far as who won the debate, I’d have to admit that it was fairly even. I don’t think that either McCain or Obama did or said anything that changed any minds on the part of the voters. As far as independents are concerned, I think they were left exactly where they were before the debate, confused and worried about their financial future, and neither candidate did anything to ease those fears.
McCain did have one economic policy surprise in which he stated he would instruct his Treasury Secretary to buy up bad loans on homes and then renegotiate those loans to make it possible for people to stay in their homes. That suggestion seemed to take Senator Obama aback a little, but because of the constraints of the debate format, there was no back and forth on the issue and any chance McCain had to score points for the idea got lost as the topic quickly moved on.
It was said that this was a debate that McCain had to win, but ironically, the format of the debate didn’t allow for a winner. McCain did fine, and if he weren’t trailing so far behind in the polls this debate would have little relevance, but McCain is trailing in the polls and McCain did need this debate to make a difference for him, and it didn’t.
McCain had suggested that he and Obama do a series of actual Town Hall debates across America during the last few months, and it’s really too bad that didn’t happen. That would have really given us a chance to see the candidates as well as giving the candidates a real chance to debate and discuss the issues facing Americans today. But it didn’t happen and it’s not going to happen.
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