I was upset immediately after the debate. I considered coming here to post my first reactions, but what will Bill Maher coming on and it being late and all, I didn't. I thought about posting yesterday when I awoke, but again other things came up.
And I'm glad.
Judging by the polls and responses, I was perhaps one the only person who saw what I thought I saw.
And I'm glad.
More after the fold....
My first reaction after the debate ended was that John McCain had browbeaten and dominated a timid Barack Obama. McCain looked every bit the angry plantation owner, and Barack Obama looked every bit the terrified house slave hoping not to get horsewhipped. "Don't speak when I'm speakin', boy." "Yessuh, massuh."
Perhaps it's because I grew up in a family where, in my childhood, it was not unusual to hear the Ku Klux Klan spoken of with reverence. "They did good things," my dad would say. "When the Klan came in, people knew what was right and what was wrong, and acted accordingly or paid the price."
I didn't agree with him, then or ever, on the Klan. Still, mine was the family that got up and left the public beach because a black family came to swim at the same lake. My mom would talk about how "They" smell, and that it was because "They" never learned to bathe properly. One Sunday afternoon, after a black group had protested at our church picnic, my dad said "It's a damn good thing they knew when to shut up. There was going to be black blood all over the ground."
I heard about how U.S. society had started down the road to hell when Gene Krupa brought "that African beat" to America, and that now (in the 60s and 70s) it was all "jungle music." I heard about how the John Birch Society were just patriots who cared about authentic American values, and that Martin Luther King, Jr. was "a communist agitator" someone who had stirred up resentment among blacks who had "been happy to know and keep their place." When Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor turned fire hoses and dogs on kids, "that's what happens when you talk back to the police." And when James Earl Ray shot King, "Praise the Lord, maybe that'll teach 'em a lesson."
It was a toxic stew in which to simmer a closeted young lesbian who knew all too painfully the costs of daring to disagree. You smiled and nodded and, if you said anything, you agreed. Or you got hit. Real simple.
So maybe it wasn't really John McCain I was seeing and hearing in the debate Friday night. Maybe it was my dad. Maybe that's why I thought McCain's condescending contempt and angry arrogance were reminiscent of a plantation owner whose house slave had come forward to talk about better treatment for the field hands.
And maybe it wasn't really Barack Obama I was seeing and hearing either. Maybe it was myself. Maybe that's why I thought Obama's impossibly calm civility in the face of McCain's rudeness was reminiscent of someone who was trying to find whatever response wouldn't get her hit.
Or maybe it was just watching an older white man browbeat and insult a younger black man, as seen through the lens of a childhood filled with simmering racism. Maybe I was being unfair, not only to Barack Obama, but to John McCain as well.
Later, when Bill Maher was done and my teenage daughter still wasn't back from her marching band gig across the county, I flipped over to MSNBC, to see what they were saying. Chris Matthews was not only questioning but visibly aghast at how McCain had treated Obama.
Someone, maybe Eugene Robinson, offered that this was typical McCain. McCain, he said, personalized policy disagreements. In order to prepare for a debate, he said, McCain had to work up a good hate against his opponent, to go out there looking to not only win, but to utterly destroy.
By contrast, the commentator argued, Obama was a conciliator by nature. Obama wasn't afraid of McCain; it just wasn't Obama's nature to get into a brawl. Obama always looks for common ground, however tiny and trivial it might seem, on which to base a constructive dialogue.
I started to think that, maybe, I'd seen an entirely different debate. That I'd missed Obama-McCain because I'd been reliving Crissie-Dad. But then Pat Buchanan joined the conversation, and if anyone can kick me into the slimy gutters of memory lane, it's Pat Buchanan. Americans, Buchanan said, will have to decide if they want a fighter or a thinker, and opined that the all-important blue-collar Democrats from rural Pennsylvania want a fighter. "Tough guys," Buchanan said, "want a tough guy, a mean guy."
(Aside: Has anyone else noticed that, since Iowa, the "all-important" demographic has consistently been whatever group(s) Obama hasn't yet won over? Just sayin'.)
By 4.30am Saturday when I awoke - I slept in a half-hour, what with my daughter not getting home til 12.20am - the spot polls were in. Obama, the spot polls seemed to suggest, had looked "more presidential." He'd remained cool and calm, whereas McCain had looked "angry." Again I began to wonder if my initial reactions had been way off base, poisoned by my own experiential filters. I read some of the responses here, and thought about whether to even bother voicing my reactions.
A dear friend popped up in private chat, and we talked about puppies and the debates and doing Kegel exercises during sex.
Herself called in the midst of that (she's still out of town) and we talked about Woofie the Younger - now Woofie the Only - and his new trait of trying to call his pack back together with a distinctly lupine howl, at once breathtakingly beautiful and heartrendingly sad. I switched the phone to speaker and put it next to him, so Herself could talk to him. He sniffed at the phone and was only marginally soothed.
By the time we rang off, my dear friend from Germany was online, and we talked about the credit crunch there, whether she'd made any progress on her job search, and the German press reaction to the debate. Obama, the German press opined, seemed "diplomatic." McCain seemed "angry."
By the time we said "bis morgen," barely four hours of sleep had caught up with me. Time to grab a bite of lunch and a nap before making roast chicken with yellow rice and mixed veggies for dinner, then settling in for the evening with a movie.
So it's Sunday morning by the time I get around to writing this. There seems to be an agreement on a Wall Street bailout plan, and it seems to be almost identical to the plan McCain crashed Thursday evening, except for a provision allowing lendors to buy federal insurance for toxic paper rather than selling the paper outright. And the overnight and next-day polls on the debates seem to confirm the initial spot polling.
Apparently I had watched a different debate than everyone else. McCain hadn't browbeaten and dominated a timid opponent after all. That was the Crissie-Dad debate I saw in my mind, not the Obama-McCain debate the rest of the country and the world saw. I was wrong.
And I'm glad.