Infomercial

I thought the Obama infomercial was pretty boring. In his effort to be substantive and to reach out to the few undecideds or soft republicans, he purposefully swung away from his lofty rhetoric into a mundane articulation of policy. Frankly, I think we could have used a jolt of his preachifying at this point -- we've seen enough policy on the stump. And the cut-away to him live at the end was totally anti-climactic.

But consider this: he did not mention Bush or McCain once during the 30 minutes. Never said, "Don't vote for him because ..." or "... failed policies of ..." Only talked about what he wanted to do. The future. Again, you may think he's the anti-christ, but the dude looked presidential.

Can you imagine McCain's 30 minutes in prime time?  Here's Juan Cole's take:

... if I had to guess, it would be ten minutes about McCain as a POW, ten minutes of McCain saying he isn’t Bush, and then ten minutes of bullshit smears about Ayers, Khalidi, socialism, celebrity, and maybe Rick Davis could go before the cameras and pull a tire gauge out of his ass.