The best way for me to express my reaction to the first Presidential debate is to state some of the things that I think Barack Obama should have said. Let me seed the discussion with a few items.  I will write it as the Obama part of a script.

Obama:

I know that John is smart enough to know the difference between preparations and preconditions.  He knows exactly what I am talking about, but he keeps pretending I said something different.  Why can’t he just talk about our disagreements in an honest way?

Obama:

The reason that we disagree on who understands the difference between tactics and strategy is that John McCain is not able to look beyond Iraq.  He keeps talking about the surge strategy.  To the issue of Iraq alone, that may be strategy.  However, in the really big picture, this is just a tactic for accomplishing limited goals in Iraq.  I am looking at accomplishing much larger goals in the entire world.

Obama:

John says that the troops know that he will take care of them. How are they supposed to know this when he voted against supporting their benefits once they returned home?  It takes more than assurances of doing one thing and then voting the opposite way.  I am not discussing walking and talking, I am discussing the obstruction that you provided in Congress when Veterans’ welfare was at stake.

Obama:

How can we take John’s assurances at face value when he has lied about so many things during this campaign?  Sure he was strongly opposed to torture when the spotlight was upon him. However, he backed down in the face of pressure from George Bush.  He allowed George Bush to define what was and wasn’t torture in direct contradiction to the obvious meaning of simple words that we all understand.  John was completely silent when George Bush did this. If John can’t take a stand when nobody is looking, how can we trust him?

Obama:

John, you keep talking about how you visited here and you visited there as evidence of your experience. If you had come back from those visits and shown good judgment about what you learned there, than you would be making a fair point. However, when you visit someplace and come back with the wrong conclusions, and I don’t visit and come up with the right conclusions, what does that say about the value of your experience compared to my judgment?

You can add more to the discussion by making comments.  It will further the discussion much more if you make your comments on this blog rather than emailing them to me.