Debate 2

Last night I watched the presidential debate. That is to say, I  sat at the library counter and watched the video on the CNN feed without any audio. So what follows is just an impression based on what my eyes saw.

President Obama was clearly much more alert and engaged than he was in Denver two weeks ago. That isn't saying too much, as he was almost asleep then. The president has a million dollar smile and it was on exhibit last night.

Likewise,  Mitt Romney looked happy and engaged for awhile. I remember thinking after fifteen minutes or so of the debate that he looked like a very good salesman who was trying to convince me I  should buy a product that I don't really need or want.

By the time an hour had gone by, I thought Romney was showing his age; he looked like a sixty-five year old man. There's nothing wrong  with that, he is sixty-five, but he looked tired for awhile. I wondered, "If this guy has to wake up at three in the morning for some crisis, will he be able to pull himself together?"

Romney rallied in the last half hour. He has a dash  of distinguished looking gray at his temples, and near the end reminded me of the kind of loan officer who smilingly tells people he cannot approve their loan applications. I also wondered how much Grecian Formula he has to  apply to get that carefully coiffed look. (What is it about Republican candidates, by the way, that they can't let us know they've gone gray? Ronald Reagan never showed a single strand of gray, even in his mid-seventies.)

CNN was running an electronic tape across the bottom of the screen, a kind of "approval-o-meter" of undecided voters. For the most part, these people seemed to like the responses of most men, though I thought they liked Obama's answers a little more. Oddly, it looked as though the undecided men liked Obama more and the women favored Romney, both marginally.

As I write this, I'm listening to a replay of the debate. I'm not an undecided voter. I have my mail-in ballot right here and will mark it for President Obama. I'll just say that I like the president's answer on energy much better than Romney's, I just wish Obama went further and said clearly that we must move towards a post-fossil fuel society by every means we can muster.

Ironically, the CNN replay broke for commercial, and there was an ad by "clean coal" claiming the Environmental Protection Agency is preventing full exploitation of coal resources.

I'm glad they finally  got around to discussing an environmental issue after concentrating almost exclusively on taxes and the deficit which, important though they are, by no means are all we need to  be concerned about.