{"id":1136,"date":"2008-10-09T22:50:18","date_gmt":"2008-10-09T21:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1136"},"modified":"2008-10-09T22:50:18","modified_gmt":"2008-10-09T21:50:18","slug":"the-american-presidential-election-76","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1136","title":{"rendered":"The American presidential election (76)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve now managed to watch the whole of the second of the Presidential election campaign debates between Barack Obama and John McCain. This time the format was different &#8211; what the Americans call a town hall meeting with a small audience and the contestants walking around<br \/>\nMcCain was better than last time and opened strong with a new initiative on the economic crisis, but overall again Obama was the more fluent and persuasive and altogether more credible. Given that McCain is behind, the debate was a clear victory for the Democratic cause.<br \/>\nThe moderator struggled to get the candidates to stick to the time limits and the format that the candidates had previously agreed. Maybe it would have been better if the debate had no rules which would have echoed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.westwingepguide.com\/S7\/Episodes\/141_TD.html\">that wonderful episode<\/a> in the last series of &#8220;The West Wing&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve now managed to watch the whole of the second of the Presidential election campaign debates between Barack Obama and John McCain. This time the format was different &#8211; what the Americans call a town hall meeting with a small audience and the contestants walking around McCain was better than last time and opened strong [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}