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| Photo courtesy of CNN.com. |
However, I was anxious this morning to see how viewers rated the two Democratic candidates. It was my good fortune that CNN posted Todd Graham's response to the performances of Bernie and Hillary; Graham is director of debate at Southern Illinois University.
To start with, Graham gave Hillary an A- and Bernie a D. From what I saw, those grades are about right. Graham followed with a detailed critique of the pair's performances:
(CNN)For Thursday night's Democratic debate, I'm focusing my debate coach evaluation squarely on improvements.
Hillary Clinton: A-
She still interrupts too much. No improvement there.
She
still has a terrible answer to the question of why she won't release
her Wall Street speech transcripts. But Sanders won't release all his
tax returns either. (They're both still ducking questions with answers
that don't pass the smell test.)
However,
Clinton did have a better debate in some significant ways. The first
was in demanding Sanders produce examples of her being influenced by
Wall Street, as he has so often charged. She asked for an example, and
when he couldn't come up with one, she said,
"This is a phony attack designed to raise questions with no evidence or
support... he cannot come up with any example, because there is no
example."
Good response...but this wasn't even her best retort of the night.
In
a discussion about the U.S.-backed military operation in Libya, for the
first time, while admitting that the ouster of Moammar Ghadafi didn't
work out as well as hoped, Clinton compared Libya to Syria. Bashar
al-Assad is a terrible dictator, just like Gadhafi was, she argued. The
difference, she pointed out? Syria is worse now, and a bigger threat
to the United States than Libya is, but Syria still has Assad. The
effective takeaway? So perhaps keeping dictators in place isn't better
than removing them.
But neither was this her best argument of the night.
I agree Virginia. I get so tired of watching Sanders with that wagging finger. When he speaks Hillary turns to him, looks at him, listens, and then responds. When she speaks he doesn't look at her, appears to be listening only to interrupt, and the constantly wags that finger in the air. It's disruptive, distracting, and deliberate - his tactic to always have the attention on him, no matter if it's his turn or not. I'm going to send you a friend request on FB :)
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