I watched much of the Democratic Presidential debate in Las Vegas last night, and I’m not the better for it. But I do run a website about politics, I figure it’s worth covering. Here are my notes from the debate.

-Hillary Clinton was good. Well, at least relative to the other Ding Dongs and Dodds up there. She just LOOKED like the frontrunner - actually answering at least one yes/no question with a yes/no and no “but…” And usually Hillary has such a big “but.” Zing! A question was also asked about the possibility of her exploiting her gender to win (who cares?), and she answered that she wasn’t getting attacked because she’s a woman, but because she’s in the lead. Snap! At the very least, she totally eclipsed Barack Obama, who I’ll write some more about later, and honestly the only other candidate who looked strong was Joe Biden, who always seems to perform well because he knows he’s not going to win and there’s no pressure. I wish that could be said of all the hopeless candidates: Kucinich, Dodd, Richardson.

-CNN’s version of an “undecided” voter must mean a Democrat who hasn’t decided from among the Democrats yet - I’m not even joking. It MUST be that way, because the “average folks” they trotted up there already wanted immediately out of the war in Iraq and nodded along with what the candidates were saying. I just assume that I’m right here, because there’d be absolutely no credibility if these were supposed to be voters “undecided” between Democrats and Republicans.

By the way, those “undecided between Democrat or Republican” people really exist. I have a question for you, if any of you are reading this: WHAT’S WITH YOU? You really haven’t formed a cogent political philosophy yet? I’m a dumb twenty-three year old and I at least know which SIDE I’m leaning to. If you honestly have entered middle age without knowing what you want from your political candidates, you should be banned from voting.

These people take a “wait and see” approach, and act like they’re excellent judges of character. “I don’t know who I’m voting for yet…I have to see it in their eyes.” No, you don’t, you’re saying made up things. This isn’t a poker game. This goes back to pretending to be moderate to be open-minded: you don’t come across as smarter just because you pretend to stay above the bipartisan fray. An intelligent man looks at this field of Republicans and says “THOSE are the moderates.”

-Barack Obama: D- performance. He couldn’t have appeared more indecisive on the “Illegal Immigrant ID” issue. Which is a dumb and pointless issue, sure, but he honestly seemed to have little idea what he was saying. I think his philosophy is to employ Italian-guy body language (talk loud and use your hands a lot) to appear confident, while really offering nothing totally meaningful to say that totally separates him from the field.

-Do you ever notice in debates, how if one candidate will start moving his body in a certain way, or doing something in particular, all the other candidates automatically follow suit? It must be how they’re coached or something. Example: late in this debate, they had all the candidates sit down while they took questions from the audience. For the first response, Joe Biden kept sitting in his chair. For the next response, Bill Richardson (I think) started standing up while talking. I thought “watch - they’ll all start doing that now.” And they did. They even started standing up while other candidates were giving responses. I think if, for the first response in the next debate, Hillary Clinton prefaced every sentence with “boom shaka laka!” they all might do it too. John Edwards would start freestyle rapping.

-Huge difference between CNN and the rest of the news world: that crowd and group of moderators were just DELIGHTED to be there. On Fox News, you have Brit Hume never cracking a smile while asking serious questions. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer plays the straight man while the other CNN reporters prove powerless to hide their excitement for these candidates, totally beaming after one candidate gave a crowd-pleasing response. Even on NBC, at least they have Tim Russert bringing out the “answer my question, Senator!” bat. Anyone who accuses Fox News of being a conservative stronghold will at least have to admit CNN is easily on the other end.

-When they bring up a lady with orange hair to ask a question on Iraq, do I really have to wait and hear what her position is?

-After a string of “who voted for what” responses, Bill Richardson had a good retort: he was a governor, and never did any voting, so don’t include him.

Did anyone else see the debate? Post up your own notes.

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