Tonight Obama and Clinton will debating in Austin. The news networks and blogs are claiming this is going to be a pivotal moment. Will Obama bomb or will Clinton collapse? I don’t think either of these are in the cards.

Candidates are not made overnight and whatever happens tonight, baring a drastic misstep (like a fist fight or duel) this debate is unlikely to make a significant difference in the direction things are moving. Even Texas and Ohio are likely to be impacted only on the margins based on this debate. There is still two weeks until those primaries, so any problems will be spun, manipulated, used, exploited and hedged by the time March 4th comes around.

There’s a tendency to ascribe a lot of value to these debates but when you consider that the debate starts at 8 ET you’re actually hosting a debate before primetime in Texas when people will still be eating, commuting, taking care of business etc. Many eyes may be glued and the news stations will rehash for days every little point, but as we know the media isn’t very adept at journalistic focus so it will be more likely be a pundit back and forth. Furthermore the debate right before the election in Ohio will hold more timely importance sticking more directly in the voters minds prior to election day.

That brings us to the next point, if Bush Jr. can win the presidency with virtually no debating skill whatsoever it can be safely said that debate performance is overrated by the media and commentators. Not to mention you have one candidate who wants to keep it clean (Obama) and the other who probably has more shameful dirt available for the exploitation (Clinton), so I don’t see the advantage of a cockfight for either.

I think we’ll hear a lot about NAFTA, Rezko, Wal-mart and other assorted tidbits about each other. Also remember this is a democratic primary so if Clinton gets too dirty she could hurt herself more, as it appeared she may have in Wisconsin (based on some exit polls). We’ll see soon enough!

Update (7:40 EST): Well Obama is getting momentum in Texas according to the latest polls, so baring a fatal gaffe at worst he’ll see a leveling off due to this evening. Pollster.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.