V.P. Debate

I watched the vice-presidential debate last night, as did a good portion of the country, according to the ratings, and I made the mistake, again, of watching it on CNN. For some reason, they decided to put a graph at the bottom of the screen tracking an audience's approval or diapproval of the nominee's answers. During the first presidential debate last week, the audience was a collection of Democratics, Republicans, and Independents, with each group having an individual line representing it, which would go up or down. Last night the audience was composed of Ohio independents, divided into men and woman, with each gender having there own line. The graphs are incredibly distracting, as they affect your perception of the debate. I got so invested in watching the line and hoping that Biden would cause it to go up with each of his answers, and then I'd worry if started to drop and I'd just be thinking, "Joe come on say say something better." Any time Palin said something that caused a jump in the approval I'd just think, "No, no you can't believe her." As a result of all this I missed the overall view of the debate. It would be fine if CNN tracked an audience's approval of the debate without a live graph of it, and then discussed the results after the precedings were over. But, anyway, who do I think won the debate - um, I don't know. Personally I much preferred Biden. The whole "aww shucks" approach of Palin is just downright annoying, and she didn't really answer a good chunk of the questions. The polls taken after the debate show a larger group of people believe Biden won the debate over Palin, so at least there's that. I think the main importance of last night was that no one did any harm to their campaigns. Palin didn't stand their drooling, looking like a deer in head lights, and Biden didn't go after her, which the media and McCain campaign would have said was horribly sexist and offensive. I still wish the moderator, Gwen Ifill, had brought up issues like Roe v. Wade and the role of the Supreme Court and evolution. The belief in evolution, I think, is an important reflection of a person's decision making skills. On one hand you have the work of many scientists over the last three decades, fossil records, genetic research and other hard evidence that organisms evolved from other organisms over the course of millions of years, and then on the other hand, you have a book written a couple of thousand years ago, and no certainty of whether it was meant as the literal truth, a metaphor, or a moral tale. To shape your understanding of the world around a single tale, rather than a bunch of hard evidence, is a sign of poor judgment. That's why the current president believed we could invade Iraq, have everyone love us and quickly set up a prospering democracy, despite all the past history of fighting between different Muslim sects and Arab countries not wanting to have intervention by Western nations. You can't shape your view of the world just on faith.