The Presidential Debate: A Drinking Game

Presidential debates are dull. Especially given that they are not really "debates" at all. So we decided to spice things up by making up our own drinking game.

90 minutes and a quarter of a bottle of scotch later, Alex is cursing John McCain. "My friends" caused him to finish his current Michel Couvreur (aged 12 years in Burgundean caves). I stuck to root beer, given that Brynna was sharing some of the drinking duties.

Our list of catchphrases:
For Obama: "middle class," "Main Street," and "the last 8 years."
For McCain: "maverick," "Obama does not understand" or "is naive," and "My friends."
The polling from the last debate seems to have knocked the "does not understand" thing out of the running. We realized partway through that we should have replaced it with "reference to working with Joe Lieberman as reaching across the aisle"—which simply IS NOT TRUE anymore!
For either candidate: "change"

We thought that some of the questions—prioritize your priorities, what sacrifices do we need to make, what don't you know and how will you learn it—were great questions but unfortunately went unanswered by either man.

Alex would also like to repeat his plea from the last debate: give the moderator the power to switch off the mike when the candidate goes over time.

Obama was a little more aggressive about defending himself this time, though that was in large part limited by the format. We think he won—especially given that this is supposed to be McCain's special format—though we are of course biased in this direction.

Brynna is much more alert and happy now that the debate is over. She and her Daddy are having a deep discussion right now about the neural pathways involved in shifting her weight from foot to foot, as she stands on Alex's lap and grins at him.

UPDATE 2008-10-08 1900: I'll also throw out this one other point - counterpoint, really. McCain asked who was the last President to raise taxes during an economic downturn? Humphrey. Well, actually that's not true, it's just a useful anecdote. More than that, I wish Obama had come back and asked: when was the last time we had massive tax cuts during a time of war?