Clinton Obama debate

I just got done watching the Clinton and Obama debate. Here are my thoughts.

In the first part of the "debate" they asked questions about Clinton's remarks about sniper fire and Obama's remarks about gun ownership and religion.

I didn't think Clinton did a very good job trying to explain her remarks about running from sniper fire. She over-worded what she was saying and fell all over it. I think she should have said less. She was caught in a lie and I don't think there was any good way to recover from it. Less would have been more.

Obama did what I thought was a pretty good job of explaining his views on why people would fall back on religion and gun ownership when voting. I'd previously heard his remarks on the Charlie Rose show and knew that there had been spin on this in the media. On the subject of gun ownership later in the debate I thought he did a better job of defining his position than Clinton did, and it seemed more reasonable to me.

When the economy came up I thought Clinton came into her own. It was clearly something she was comfortable with, unlike explaining her sniper fire comments. I thought she did well in this respect. I thought she did better than Obama on the economy.

On the war I thought Obama was more reasonable with respect to withdrawing troops. I thought he had a clear focus with regard to the war and what to do. I didn't get that from Clinton. She stuck by her guns on numbers to withdraw but didn't really explain why. I got the impression she didn't know why.

My general impression was that Obama tried to get the debate back to the issues and Clinton tried to keep finding faults with Obama.