Blogger Still Shaking His Head Over the Reid/Angle Debate

I've been trying to blog about something today, but keep shaking my head over Harry Reid's performance in his debate against Sharron Angle. Not only was his delivery awful, the substance - the insurance industry almost destroyed the economy! - was wildly misinformed and belied an instinctive distrust for free markets of any kind. Can someone be a socialist and not even realize it? If, yes, Harry Reid has found a way.

Luckily for Reid, he is a Democrat, so his allies in the media have spent the last 24 hours moving goalposts and downplaying Sharron Angle's performance in a rear guard action to save Reid's job. For example, it turns out that Angle's exhortation to Reid that he "man up" over the precarious condition of Social Security is ... sexist! (h/t JustOneMinute)

Tea Partier Sharon Angle continues to induce brain freeze in her critics. The latest victims are Tommy Christopher of Mediaite and Alan Colmes of wherever. Let's start with Mediate:

‘Man Up?’ What if Harry Reid Told Sharron Angle to ‘Act Like a Lady?’

and over to Alan:

Was Sharron Angle Sexist To Tell Harry Reid, “Man Up!”?

Sorry, boys, but I think the rule is, women can continue to tell men to "man up" for as long as black people can call one another "n*****." Also, as the NY Times helpfully points out, Democratic women are big on the "man up" jab, the better to try to generate "I am woman, hear me roar" press coverage.

More important is the unrelenting effort to label Sharron Angle "extreme" while carefully avoiding any mention of anything particularly extreme that she has done or said. I keep hearing that she is in favor of privatizing Social Security. Wow, no one's ever thought of that! The details of Angle's extremity seem a little too conveniently vague to take seriously. We heard all about Christine O'Donnell's "extreme" views on masturbation and pre-marital sex (she's against both. that's extreme now?) very quickly and in great detail, after all.

Still, the liberal commentariat persists. Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones says Angle is simply the sort of carnival show that a pro like Harry Reid has to wade through in 2010.

So I guess that's where we are. Freakish candidates are now held to such low standards that all they have to do is surprise us by not sounding like they belong in a locked mental ward. Welcome to 2010.

Again, some details on what makes her a freak or "freakish", please? She looks like a middle aged grandma with stout conservative principles. Harry Reid, meanwhile, was rambling about colonoscopies and acting like he believed no person in America could obtain preventive medical care without government intervention. Talk about a freak show...

James Joyner simply declares that, in this debate, everyone was a loser

The point seems to be, not that Angle wasn’t as awful as everyone figured she’d be but that she was every bit as good — or, should I say, every bit as bad — as Harry Reid. Reid has been in the Senate 23 years and the leader of the Senate Democrats since 2005. So, to the extent that these faux debates are a measure of competence to hold the office in question, holding her own against the veteran incumbent demonstrated that she was up to the task. Or, at least, as up to it as Reid.

I don't know why Joyner feels like he needs to insult Angle's intelligence. If she's so stupid, how is it she easily went toe to toe with the majority leader of the Senate and even rattled him a number of times?

Joyner also wonders why we have debates anyway. Of course, conventional wisdom has always been that Dems are superior to Republicans in debate, thus the endless calls for as many debates as possible. But, now that this supposed advantage has failed to save Reid, debates are suddenly as relevant to 21st century America as paper title deeds.

Now, I happen to think these scripted exchanges of talking points with an interlocutor from the press are mostly worthless. Indeed, I’m not sure that even Oxford or Lincoln-Douglas style debates tell you much about competence to perform in a given political office. Those, at least, test intellect, the ability to think on one’s feet, and temperament. But the skill sets are still only tangentially related to the day-to-day task of governing.

I'll agree that modern political debating is a lot more about show biz and memorization than it is about leadership, but still...we always manage to learn something about the candidates, don't we?

Snipping Off The Things They Find: The Reid/Angle Debate

Had talk radio on in the background for much of the day, as I finished up a project. Rush and Mark Levin were playing extended excerpts from the Reid/Angle debate last night with Reid breaking the sound barrier on the Unintentional Comedy scale (and probably irreparably damaging his re-election chances, at least according to his normally sympathetic friends in the media).

Don Surber has the transcript for the section (starts around the 2:10 mark) that was getting all of the airplay on Far Right Radio:

“Insurance companies don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it out of a profit motive and they have almost destroyed our economy. We need them to be forced to do mammograms. That’s why you see Breast Cancer Awareness Month, you see the baseball players wearing pink shoes and you see the football players having pink, uhh, helmets. You detected it if you do mammograms. Colonoscopies! If you do colonoscopies, colon cancer does not come ’cause you snip off the things they find when they go up, and no more. And we need to have — have insurance companies do this. It will save money in the long run to do this.”

Reading the above doesn't do this justice. You have to hear Reid saying these words in his inimitable low-key drone. (Is that what a Nevadan accent sounds like?) Surber says he had to pull his car over, he was laughing so hard. I agree it was laugh out loud funny to hear his flailing, especially after a lifetime of "conservatives are stupid" jokes from the sophisticated Left. But, there was also something in there that was not funny at all.

Reid, as you may know, is the Senate Majority Leader, and thus one of the most important - not to mention powerful - political figures in Washington, if not the world. And yet he attacks the insurance industry for being driven by (hissss) the "profit motive." Not only that, he claims that the insurance industry "almost destroyed our economy." They did?! I read the Wall Street Journal every day, and I must have missed that. He also seems to think that nothing could happen in the health care field without government intervention. No mammograms. No colonoscopies. No Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Even football players would not be wearing "pink helmets"without the steady hand of government to lead the way. (The reality is that the pink gloves that the NFL has been rocking came about from a joint effort by the League and Reebok.)

Reid clearly has no faith whatsoever in the private market or the "profit motive." He also has no idea what happens in the supposedly Dickensian US health care system, where mammograms and colonoscopies and a million other miracles are routine procedures done by the million. He's clueless, despite having led the effort to "reform" a system that most of us didn't want reformed to begin with. Yet, we've been treated to endless stories about how Sharron Angle is "extreme" (without any specific elaboration on what about her is extreme). How can she be extreme as compared to a man who doesn't think there's a place for private initiative in any aspect of health care? That's not just extreme, it's frightening; but watch Reid droning on and on - he and many of his listeners find his attitude to be unremarkable and reasonable.

In a just world, the colorless uncharismatic Reid would be 20 points down. Instead, Angle is just a few points ahead, and there's talk that Reid might eke out a win via the unions and Hispanic voters. Indeed, one of Reid's media cheerleaders even wondered why Reid stooped to debating Angle in the first place, as if avoiding debate was a legitimate option. The fact that he was so hideously exposed makes one wonder about the wits of the rest of the Senate's Democratic caucus.

Still, Angle is starting to carry herself like a winner. And, she's beginning to go for the jugular. For one thing, she asked Reid a question at the debate that no journalist would dare to ask a liberal Democrat: how was it that Harry Reid left Searchlight, NV a poor man and became one of the richest men in the Senate on a public servant’s salary? Reid's answer, in which he claims to have been living on a "fixed income" (???) is another classic.