I put together a few thoughts on the debate and the media and a "debate" and the format, winning and losing, and the election.
Nobody who is pro choice is voting for Oz. After Dobbs, it became a live and practical issue for those who didn't think anything would change. At that point, pro-choice people took advantage of the wide array of information regarding where the candidates are on the issue. They realized that they would not get a 50th vote to codify Roe unless the Democratic Party added two more US Senators to their number. They heard about Lindsay Graham and heard him say that his antichoice bill would get a vote and pass if Republicans held the Senate. Then they heard Oz say that a local political leader should make the final decision regarding whether a woman can choose or not. Nobody, NOBODY who is okay with that is pro-choice. They may incorrectly label themselves that way, but Donald Trump thinks he is an expert on everything and a genius. If you feel better going a long with your friend's charade, then I certainly can't stop you. But facts in evidence already show the claim to be pro-choice is false.
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A well meaning Kossacks who definitely does support the good team and wants the good team to win wrote that the debate could not have gone worse for Lt Gov Fetterman. When questioned, they seemed intent on defending their hyperbolic statement.
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Let's remember that we are all on edge here because the upcoming elections will determine if we retain our democracy and if we get to codify Roe and get a voting rights bill passed and we all know that there are many close races. It could go either way.
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Are you trying to defend your hyperbolic statement? Let's assume that if he were completely unable to debate, there would have been no debate. How does that prove that the debate could not have gone worse? I could mention dozens of ways it could have gone worse without there being a substantially better reason to not have a debate than already existed. Hell, if Oz hadn't said a local politician should decide for a woman whether she should or should not, could or could not have an abortion, then the debate would have been worse. That answer alone is an automatic deal breaker for anybody who triedis pro-choice. Generally speaking, the media and political nerds like us give far too much weight to debates in that we think that whomever we view as having won the debate will win the election. The real danger is if a debate confirms a view of a candidate's immorality or extremism or being out of touch or ignorance. Nothing of this sort happened in the debate. Think of President George H W Bush looking at his watch. I suppose it is possible for a candidate to do something so bad that even a one time really terrible gaffe (a normal gaffe alone probably isn't enough to shake up a race) could alter the outcome of the election.
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Let's think about this from a voter's perspective. How many people are really undecided in this election? See, I don't think there are that many. Our voters are aware of what's at stake. They know that democracy is on the ballot and a woman's right to choose is on the ballot and voting rights are on the ballot. Nobody who leans left and cares about those issues is going to skip voting or vote for Dr. Oz. Everybody in Pennsylvania knows that Lt Gov Fetterman had a stroke. This is not new information. They know he is improving. Lt Gov Fetterman will continue to recover. He will improve. What won't improve is Dr Oz's shitty character and terrible policy views and willingness to acquiesce to whatever Mitch McConnell says . They know that women's bodily autonomy will not improve, but rather will worsen if Oz gets in the Senate. They know that this election is likely to determine who has control of the Senate.
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Consider also what does it mean to win the debate? The Republicans will always say their candidate won the debate. What metrics are we using? Do we really believe that most voters will vote for whoever won the debate instead of choosing a candidate for other reasons like saving democracy and a woman's right to choose? Who will decide who won the debate for the voter? The voter themselves and they will probably decide that their candidate won because the media that they listen to, the media which told them who to vote for, said so. Suppose you care a lot about policies like having a democracy and based upon a stupid way of evaluating a useless performance and process, you figure most people are likely to say the other guy won. Does that mean that you're not going to vote or you're not going to vote for your candidate? What if you realize that in this three card Monte performance which will be evaluated by many people in the most shallow way possible, your candidate will be deemed to have lost but that you realize that this show was never a reasonable way to determine who should be in government, but that evaluated as it is now, it's worse than useless.
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Can you think of a worse way to decide if a candidate should work in government? It's difficult. Maybe whoever put on the best show at a circus might actually be a better way at determining who should work in government? And everyone evaluating is biased and a huge number of them can't tell their ass from their face and we aren't able to help them since what comes out of both ends seems to be the same. I mean truly. Maybe a long, long time ago, if people voted on qualifications, wait we are trying to determine if a debate was ever useful and qualifications doesn't really come up and isn't evaluated by anybody with real expertise. Now, it's just I will ignore the question, say my campaign themes, and run over the moderators, and partisans on both sides will say their candidate won so long as nobody drooled on themselves and everybody seemed capable of using the bathroom and dressing themselves. Those watching aren't really learning anything meaningful. The format isn't set up to actually yield valuable information for a voter. It's designed to get a gotcha or to other a candidate. It doesn't tell us how knowledgeable a candidate is on important topics. But even if it did, team red wouldn't care if their candidate could name the fucking three branches of the federal government and their candidate aspired to be in one of those branches and the stupid people of Alabama put him in there even though he was a fucking football coach with no semblance of qualification for the positions he sought and they justified this because the other guy who was actually qualified and prepared for the position and had actually served in it honorably had the temerity to be in a different tribe than the backwoods backwards voters.
What rational voter would base their vote on this ? Especially if they knew that one candidate would stand up for democracy and not pretend to know better than the pregnant person what was best for her and the other one would sell out democracy to Mitch McConnell for anything Mitch might deign to give him and would throw in the bodily autonomy of women in as a free gift to him and Lindsay Graham.
In a few months, Lieutenant Governor Fetterman will be much better, but Dr. Wizard will still be an asshole who only claims a residence in the state he hopes to represent so that he can lawfully win the election. The wizard's position is inherently sexist. Men are vastly overrepresented in government relative to their numbers, but he believes that a local politician should determine what happens to a pregnant person's body, something he would never ever say should be true of a man's body. I mean really, does anybody out there think for even a moment that the wizard would support a law taking away the bodily autonomy of a man and give it to a local politician? Of course not. Even so, the male would be better off because they were more likely to be represented by somebody who shares their gender. Now this is most likely to affect people of color, those impoverished, and those who are younger and less established. Such a person is even less likely to be represented in that local politician position that the wizard refers to by somebody who can identify with their life. How is it any better at all to make the white male who is so wise as to be able to determine the right course of action for a large number of women, many of color, whom they don't even know a local politician than a politician in the federal government? How is it better that it's a local politician rather than a politician in the federal government? How is that better for the pregnant person? It isn't.
This view is so fraught with stupidity and immorality that it is immediately disqualifying. So, if we learned anything valuable at all from this circus and the carnival barkers who sought to determine who fell for a gotcha, we learned that this candidate with multiple earned Harvard degrees is brave enough to stand up for our democracy and woman's bodily autonomy and that his opponent isn't. And I suppose that will have to do, but that's certainly enough to tell us who must win this election to represent the state of Pennsylvania in the august body complete with the fella who can't name the three branches of the federal government (wonder if anybody bothered to enlighten him or perhaps they figured that if their plan to eradicate our democracy and replace it with fascism with them in charge would take place in less time than it would take him to learn about the three branches of the federal government and how a bill becomes a law) known as the US Senate.
Go Fetterman!!!