2nd Presidential Debate Review

Once again, I watched on CNN. Not because I enjoy listening to the Talking Heads there, but they have wonderful and informative graphics during the debate.

If you have HD TV, you can see 6 CNN analysts give PLUS and MINUS points to each candidate and you can see what makes a difference in their minds.

However, much more important is the graph at the bottom of the screen with green (Men) and orange (women) lines showing the reaction of each gender of a group of Uncommitted voters from Ohio.

You can see a replay of the 2nd Presidential Debate with the responses of these Uncommitted voters at the CNN website.

Interesting results were:

Barack Obama got high marks from both men and women very often when talking about specific ideas he had to solve economic problems.

When John McCain attacked Obama, the scores were flat-lining at zero and occasionally going negative. Every time he stopped talking about his plans and switched to focusing on what Obama had or hadn't done, the voters turned their dials to zero. They didn't want to hear about the past, they wanted to get information about the future.

Women often gave higher scores to each candidate than men did.

The analysts were almost unanimous in their preference for Obama with minimal negative marks for Obama for most of the debate and a consistent awarding of several negative points to McCain by all analysts.

Obama's biggest flaw was that he rarely stayed within the time allotment. (McCain wasn't much better.) I am sure Tom Brokaw was pretty ripped, but it didn't seem that the viewers minded.

Perhaps Barack Obama's ideas were just plain better than John McCain's. I think it is more likely that people think more highly of the things they want to hear when said by the people they like hearing from. I don't know a lot about how CNN picked the individuals and exactly how evenly distributed they were among ideology, but this is yet another tough sign for John McCain.