McCain asks for town hall meetings with Obama
John McCain has sent a letter (and asked openly in a speech today) to Sen. Barack Obama asking him to participate in 10 town hall meetings between now and the Democratic convention.
He wants to hold the first one on June 12 and then hold one every week after that. These joint town-hall meetings will allow for a “higher standard of discourse” according to McCain. He wants to “reform the tenor of political discourse” in America as part of this campaign of change.
Well then… this is rather unexpected. This is like Nixon begging Kennedy to an open, televised debate. What does McCain have up his sleeve? He keeps saying Obama should stop looking to the past, but maybe McCain should start? These things didn’t go so well for Nixon, and I daresay Nixon was a better speaker than McCain. Maybe he’s hoping for a constant stream of ridiculous, bigoted questions from the audience? Who knows.
Obama is a ridiculously good speaker and debater and I’m not sure what McCain thinks he can accomplish with this. We’ll see what Obama does with this. I do know that if these things happen, they’ll be great to watch!
-Mike
Actually, I found Obama performed rather lackluster in the debates this season, but I was impressed by his town hall style Candidates@Google (go youtube it) appearance. I think Barack is at his best in town hall meetings because it allows a Q & A format while still allowing the speaker to talk at length.
And I think it goes without saying that I think the town hall debates would be a good thing, provided McCain doesn’t use creationist-style diversions from fact, and given Barack’s skill, I think he could call him out for it and possibly refuse to continue more debates.