The First Great Debate

Well, today is the Big Day, at least in this part of October 2012.   Tonight the long anticipated First Great Debate will be held between B. Obama, the current President of the United States, and M. Romney, who is bitterly aspiring to take Obama's place and deny him an absolutely necessary second term in office.   At least 60 million Americans are expected to view the debate on television.

I will not be one of them, even though I couldn't anyway because of the way my technical gear is set up.   We have a television set and a big one, if a 27-incher could still be called big, but we have no working tuner to go with it.   I suppose there is a way that I could get it live on our computers, but I don't want to go to the trouble of finding out.   So I plan to content myself with "live-blogging" on the Daily Kos site, while wife will probably accept an invitation by one of her fellow political workers to view it at her house elsewhere in the county.

I am not afraid of the outcome.   I don't see how the debate could come out badly for Obama.   He's cool, while Romney obviously is not.   But I am concerned about one little thing, and that is "the Reagan Shot."

I can recall all too vividly how back when he was running against W. Mondale, R. Reagan used a schoolyard-type taunt that was familiar to me from days of old, and it turned out to be amazingly and also distressingly effective.  In answer to nearly everything that Mondale said, Reagan would keep saying, "There he goes again."   And he coupled that with never saying Mondale's name.   And, much to the country's detriment, Reagan won that election by a landslide, and that allowed him to go on with  -- as someone said at the time, nearly bankrupting the U.S. while preparing for nuclear war, by quadrupling the National Debt.

Reagan's behavior in that election sickened me in a way that has still never completely subsided, especially because I still haven't thought of a destroying return shot that I could use if I were in Obama's shoes. though I haven't tried very hard either.   I'm sure I could if I put my mind to it.  There was something so childish about that that I thought was completely unfitting to a Presidential race, and it was made all the worse because it seemed to have worked, though that of course wasn't the only thing that helped Reagan in that election.   In obscenity it compared to the way that the Iranian ayatollahs had cooperated with him and therefore had worked against another good Democrat, J. Carter, four years earlier, by delaying the release of the American hostages till the day after Reagan's inauguration.

Romney has already said that he might use Reagan's "There you go again" at least a couple of times, and it is the general impression that instead of disclosing what he would do as President, he will instead spend most of his time trying to act as a fact-checker of whatever Obama says -- a 2012 adaptation, I guess, of the Reagan Shot.

Naturally Obama and his people have long been aware of all this, and so it will be interesting first, to see what Romney will do, and second, to see how Obama will deal with it.

But even then, it won't be quite as interesting to me personally as it would have if N. Gingrich had prevailed over his fellow Republicans instead.  Gingrich was so successful in debates against the rest of the "Crazy Eight," including Romney, most of the time, during the Republican primary, that his supporters kept licking their chops in anticipation of him debating Obama.   They kept assuring us that this meant that Gingrich would wipe the floor with Obama.

That was so starkly unlikely that I badly wanted to see him try,  in addition to how, in all his nonsense, the Newt is so much more interesting a character than Romney.  But such was not to be.  Obama, as I said before, is way too cool for all that kind of stuff anyway, and he, as we used to say in the days of preparing for racial equality at long last, is ready.