Philly Debate: Salon Proclaims Edwards Winner
As this Salon.com review of last night's debate put it, Obama's self-induced pre-debate hype landed with a resounding thud:
Before the debate, the evening was ballyhooed as Barack Obama's breakout night -- the point in the campaign when the fledgling Illinois senator would finally display his mettle by aggressively challenging Hillary Clinton. Obama telegraphed his punches in advance, promising the New York Times in an interview, "Now's the time for us to make these distinctions clear."
Instead, Obama could not even muster the gumption to lob a rhetorical coconut cream pie in Clinton's direction. He set the tone for the evening in the first seconds of the debate when, challenged to repeat his recent critiques of Clinton, he said soothingly, "Well, first of all, I think some of this stuff gets off-hyped" before lapsing into a labored (and obviously rehearsed) Rocky versus Apollo Creed analogy.
Like the reviews of the New Hampshire debate several weeks ago, it was Edwards again who outshone his closest rivals and Obama continued to falter, unable to deliver on the promise of an alternative to the Hillary Clinton Machine:
A stranger to politics who had somehow missed the outbreak of "Obama-mania" -- the nearly $80 million he raised, the often rhapsodic press coverage and the huge crowds -- might have assumed from watching Tuesday's debate that the Illinois senator was a minor candidate on the fringes of the action. It seemed as if Clinton's principal antagonists were John Edwards and -- when he was given a chance to speak -- Chris Dodd. The two of them, sometimes joined by Biden, took on the traditional political task of bringing the highflying front-runner back to earth.
This may have been Edwards' best debate, as he displayed the smiling aggressiveness that had eluded him when he was going head-to-head with Dick Cheney as the 2004 vice-presidential nominee. Again and again, Edwards took lines from his stump speech and made them seem fresh as debate responses. Edwards rattled off a litany of Clinton's zigzag comments on topics ranging from Iraq to Iran to Social Security before concluding harshly, "I think the American people ... deserve a president of the United States that they know will tell them the truth."
As Edwards continued banging away with drumbeats of criticism throughout the evening (saying of Clinton's Iran position, "Our responsibility as presidential candidate is to be in 'tell the truth' mode all the time"), the cameras caught Clinton glaring at Edwards with daggers darting from her eyes before turning on a smile when she was asked to respond.
Hillary double-speak came to a head as the debate neared its end and Edwards was unwilling to let her get away with it as initial media coverage continued to do while it anointed Hillary as the de facto nominee.
Only in the last 10 minutes of the debate, long after it seemed as if she had absorbed the worst without losing her stride, did the New York senator suddenly stumble in the homestretch. Asked if she supported New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to permit illegal immigrants to apply for driver's licenses, Clinton appeared to express home-state solidarity by declaring, "What Gov. Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform." After Dodd, veering right, came out against this proposal, Clinton suddenly interrupted the proceedings to announce, "I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done."
That was the moment when Edwards pounced with the quickness of a trial lawyer who has realized that an opposing lawyer has just made a fatal error that undermines her case. "Unless I missed something," Edwards said with ill-disguised glee, "Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes ... America is looking for a president who will say the same thing, who will be consistent, who will be straight with them. Because what we've had for seven years is double talk from Bush and from Cheney." All that was missing was a Marvel comic-book exclamation like "Pow!" or "Whap!"