The Fight of the Featherweights: Obama and McCain bore me to tears

The headline in Tuesday's New York Post said it all: Tired out.

What had been billed as the biggest thing to happen in Mississippi since the siege of Vicksburg went off with a resounding thud.

The first presidential debate between Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL) last Friday night was one yawn short of a zero-hour study hall.

Want proof?

This debate drew nearly 8 million fewer viewers than the first debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry in 2004.

As you might imagine, I have a few theories to explain this lack of interest.

First, our candidates are predictable at best and predictably boring at worst.

Did you hear any new information come out of either candidate? Perhaps something of substance for those of us who aren't inclined to throw support behind either without knowing a little more?

Of course you didn't.

What you heard, if indeed you tuned in, was more empty rhetoric about the economy, and how what happens on Wall Street affects Main Street – a trite catchphrase adopted by members of both parties during the recent credit crisis.

We weren't even eight minutes into the proceedings and both candidates had already borrowed the line from each other.

And from there, they bored us with talk of taxation.

Ok, we get it.

Obama wants to "Robin Hood" (that's a verb now) the rich while McCain prefers to "Ronald Reagan" the poor.

Honestly, how many more times do we have to hear about taxes? We get it already.
I'd rather go back a year and listen to Obama and Sen. Clinton argue about their virtually identical healthcare plans.

Second, could this debate have been any more sterile? I realize that the event organizers didn't want the debate to look like a pep rally for either candidate, but did the auditorium at Ole Miss have to be as quiet as a mime's funeral?

In so doing, they created a situation in which our two candidates looked like fish out of water. Without the instant affirmation of partisan cheers and pity snickers, these two were walking over their already well-worn jokes.

When McCain returned to the well and pulled up his standby line about earmarks (you know, the one about paternity tests for bears in Montana), no one laughed.

No one laughed when he called "earmarking" a "gateway drug", either.

But in the interest of full disclosure, McCain did get a couple guffaws after he said that it would be hard for Obama to "reach across the aisle from that far to the left." The only problem, of course, was that the only people who actually thought it amusing were McCain and Obama.

We're not laughing, Senator, because we're either crying or, in the case of those who were actually in Oxford Friday night, sleeping.

And Obama didn't fair any better, mind you.

Like, for instance, when moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS suggested that neither candidate seemed interested in putting forth any major changes to their presidential agendas in the aftermath of the forthcoming bailout bill in Congress.

Obama commenced spinning his wheels, claiming that some things would have to be delayed.

By some things, Senator, I think you mean most things.

Decreases in revenue accompanied by increases in spending tend to have a noxious affect on the economy. New government entitlement programs during a recession is bad business, and both candidates know that.

Things are different now, gentlemen.

To take the stage in front of millions of Americans fearful of an even more acute economic downturn and sing the same old song would be sad if it weren't so typical.

Americans like me are tired of the fight of the featherweights.

Be real. Tell the truth.

This is not a game to us.