Overall, I can sum up my opinion of last night’s debate in one sentence: It sucked. For a town hall format, the questions being asked were ridiculous. The candidates spent an overwhelming majority of the debate reiterating their platform’s views on a number of things. This was unnecessary, boring, and for McCain, a complete waste of time.

It was obvious that McCain had to be spectacular last night as polls indicate that he is trailing Obama; however, there was no “memorable” line from the debate which will be replayed over and over on news networks. There was no drastic attack on Obama’s platform which will swing undecided voters towards the Republican ticket. And most importantly, they still haven’t had a fist fight on stage to settle the score as Japanese politicians do.

Going back to the questions being ridiculous… the only question worthy of the town hall format came right at the end:

“What don’t you know and how will you learn it?”

This was by far the most appropriate question for this kind of debate. Instead of hearing more about Russia and Iran, people want to know more about the candidates on a personal level. Though Obama and McCain didn’t have a say so in the pool of questions from last night, it’s upsetting that the second presidential debate was wasted reiterating topics covered in the first.

I’m not going to get into any specifics about the “winner”, because honestly, there wasn’t one for this particular debate. However, from a larger stance, Obama could have afforded to have last night go down the way it did. All he had to do was appear relatively competent and worthy of the title of commander-in-chief, and his objective would have been accomplished. I’ll admit, he did just this. McCain had to make some significant move to appeal to the undecided voters by either a.) uncovering grim truths about Obama or b.) making himself out to be the more practical candidate. He accomplished neither one of these and will unfortunately pay dearly at the polls.

…and you thought that I was biased towards the Republicans. If the Democrats have a successful event, I’ll always acknowledge that. If the Republicans fail at something, I’ll acknowledge that too. But I’ll always think that Obama’s (and the Democratic ticket’s) views on small business and the upper class are the two worst ideas that could be implemented to stabilize our economy and social structure. Feel free to debate me on that.