A High-Tech Lynching?

Now it can be told: ABC stands for "Attacking Barack Constantly!"

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton faced off at the debate before the Pennsylvania primary last night on ABC, and it amounted to what the lamentable Clarence Thomas would have called a "high-tech lynching." Obama was asked a question about his "elitist" San Francisco speech about bitter proletarian voters, which he reasonably expected, but then he faced questions about Jeremiah Wright, a subject he thought he'd dealt with already, and a voter's question repeated the canard about his refusal to wear a flag lapel pin. Hillary Clinton got fewer "gotcha" questions from the panel - including former Bill Clinton spokesman George Stephanopoulos - and as a result Hillary was able to come up with crisper replies. She also threw out rather barbed responses to Obama's statements, suggesting that she was in cahoots with Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann even noted that a question about Obama's friendship with a former member of the Weathermen bombers of the early seventies was asked by Stephanopoulos after Fox's Sean Hannity brought it up with the former Bill Clinton aide.

This debate served no purpose whatsoever. Gibson and Stephanopoulos didn't even get to the issues until later in the evening, by which time several viewers must have tuned out (as Keith Olbermann suggested). Not only was Obama driven to frustration by the silly questions, Hillary Clinton only made herself look nastier than she is, no dooubt driving up her negative poll numbers in the process. Obama is already decrying the use of "gotcha" questions in this debate, making possibly making him look like a whiner.

If any candidate benefited from this display of bad political theater, it was John McCain.