Well, I have seen both the republican and democratic presidential debates before Super Tuesday. Florida recently had it’s primary which narrowed the field of candidates on both sides. Giuliani staked his entire bid for the presidency on winning Florida’s primary. He failed, not even placing second, so he realized that he’s a dumb cunt and dropped out. I really thought he could have had the potential to become a force on the republican side but I also didn’t know he wouldn’t participate in the first primaries on the idea that it was pointless to battle for the first smaller states. Also dropping out of the race was candidate John Edwards, he was able to pull in a consistent 15% of the vote but that wasn’t enough.

I’ll talk first about the democratic debate because I literally just shut off the TV from watching it. I definitely think that Obama won this debate. Even though this is no definite winner in these debates there is always one candidate that out performs the other and I would hand this one to Barack. Hillary’s answers were good but not spectacular and she seemed to be on the defensive a lot of the time. I also should have counted how many times Hillary said “um”. It probably was close to 300 times. In Hillary’s defense I want to address a couple things I noticed.

Hillary has been asked about 100,009 times about her authorizing the president to take military action in Iraq back in 2002. I think Wolfe Blitzer sort of took a shot at her and put words in her mouth instead of being a neutral party that asked questions to the candidates. I don’t think Wolfe should do anymore debates because it was a real dick move to say that Hillary was naive in authorizing the war. Hillary has said a million times she acted on the information she had at the time. Hell, most of the country was all for kicking ass all over the planet after 9/11. Hillary voted for action in Iraq after she was fed information from the executive branch and the CIA that later turned out to be fabricated. The question of if it was a mistake or not cannot be followed by a logical answer. Based on the information of the time Hillary made the correct decision, she can’t help it if the government made up the fact that there were weapons of mass destruction. Hillary was only a senator, she can’t verify such classified information.

The other point that crept up was the issue of Bill Clinton’s influence. Hillary definitely seems like a strong-minded and independent woman, to say that her husband would actually strongly influence her decisions so much as to compromise her position of power is a sexist idea I think. Just because Hillary is a woman people instantly assume that Bill is going to have a greater natural presence than her. How many presidents do you think were influenced by their wives? Probably a lot, considering they are fucking married and live together. It doesn’t even have to be the influence of which military target to strike but spouses can always have even an emotional effect which carries over into other things in the president’s schedule. Sure it’s an interesting question but one that I don’t think is even valid and should not be asked in a debate. Why don’t we talk about how we are going to fix widespread hunger in the United States rather than discuss spouses.

Obama performed well; his responses to the questions were eloquent and thoughtful. I do agree with Obama on his stance of the Iraq war and that is to set an exact date for withdrawal instead of Hillary’s proposal which has to set date. Right now though Hillary crushed Obama in the Florida primary like whoa. Barack’s obvious strong demographic are African Americans but this still less than 20% of the population. Even though I still think Obama has a lot of road to go, perhaps his very good performance in these past few debates especially this last one will help him in the polls.

The republican presidential primary was more interesting I thought because it was down to four people but each of them were at each other’s throats. Mike Huckabee even commented part of the way through that he would like to be part of the debate, referencing that for the past 20 minutes only Romney and McCain were asked questions. I think all four of the republicans are strong in their positions and were able to defend them pretty well. Probably my favorite candidate from the republican debate was long forgotten Ron Paul. Even though he was offered few questions and chances to make remarks I thought he was genuine in his responses and didn’t try to make anyone happy. Ron Paul was blunt and to the point, I’d even go so far to say as he was a true scapper. Ron Paul doesn’t think we should be in Iraq and I enjoy how he calls the United States an empire. He is totally correct about it, too. Ron Paul was the only one to realize that we are spending more than we can afford all over the world, mainly in Iraq, and that we cannot keep it up.

John McCain and Mitt Romney spent most of the debate taking shots at each other for misquoting and small nuances in their stance on Iraq. You could tell that Mitt wanted to get as many shots in at McCain as he could before Super Tuesday since McCain beat him in Florida and is leading in virtually all of the Super Tuesday polls. McCain also said that we might have to be in Iraq for 100 years in some form of peace keeping which was an incredibly bold thing to say, I think. I don’t think either candidate performed particularly well which is funny because they are the two front runners for the republican party. They spent the majority of the time picking fights with one another and no important issues were really discussed. Mitt spent a lot of time trying to convince everyone that he’s a hardcore conservative and doesn’t want to be seen as a moderate which would be blasphemy in the republican party. Really the republican nominee is not of much concern because it is virtually impossible for the republicans to hold the White House.