I'm just going to note my impressions this evening, and keep all the links, etc. out. Okay, I'll put in one: Mark Evanier points to the fact-checking on the debate.
The plan this evening was for Kathy and me to watch the last two episodes of season 1 of Lost on DVD before watching the debate. They started showing it from the beginning on Sci-Fi and G4 last week, we got hooked, and I started getting the DVDs from the library and Netflix, and we're going through it like crack. Unfortunately, I was not aware that the season 1 finale was twice the length of other episodes. Further complicating matters was that I set the TV to CNN (DirecTV has a news feed channel with 8 news channels, and CNN's audio only, and it seemed the more neutral option to Faux Noise or MSNBC) and paused the TiVo. With TiVo, it only stores up to a half hour of live TV, and we were coming up to 9:30 around the halfway point of Lost's season 1 finale when we stopped the disc and watched the debate.
CNN had something on the bottom of the screen to monitor the reaction to the debate. Red line for Republican, blue for Democrat, and green for Independent. I'm not sure who CNN selected to monitor their reactions, but it made me think of what I read about focus groups watching a TV pilot where they're given a knob to turn one way if they like what they're seeing, another way when they don't. As I suspected, during the debate whichever candidate was speaking their party's line was higher in the approval. Red went up for when McCain spoke, blue when Obama spoke. And the green Independent line sometimes went with whomever was speaking. But I noticed it merged with the Obama/blue line when talk of Iraq came up during the debate. I think a lot of people are going to say their guy won the debate, but if CNN's "approval graph" is an accurate indication, if I would choose, I would give it to Obama.
There are other reasons, most of all that Obama was able to defend himself and there wasn't the frustration that I have felt in the past whenever I've watched political events like this in the past. And it seemed to me that McCain hit on that "Obama doesn't understand" line too much, which I can understand that the first debate was to be about foreign policy, but we had to address the elephant in the room (i.e. the current financial crisis) first, and that McCain's advantage would be to express his experience over Obama's, but using the same phrase over and over? Plus, I totally spaced on Palin's lack of experience in foreign matters. And McCain mentioning not winning Miss Congeniality got Kathy in the mood to watch that Sandra Bullock movie. But this may be another case of someone spinning it that "his guy" won.
So we finished watching the debate around 11. Went back and finished the Lost season 1 finale. Fortunately, Kathy's off tomorrow so we could stay up and watch all this.