UK view of presidential candidates

[smudgex68]

Browsing a noted "right wing" UK daily newspaper for a poker story I came across this poll regarding the US presidential debates. Apart from the question "which candiate "looked best"" for which the readers of this paper may have taken the literal cosmetic interpretation, I still find it interesting the impression of these centre-right UK readers. Having seen the debate last Friday I can only conclude that from a UK perspective, both candidates were very weak in a debating forum format, probably because "traditional" political face-to-face verbal debating is not common in the US but is a weekly occurrence in the UK House of Commons.

Preferred candidate

[IrishHand]

Yeah...our presidential "debates" are pretty contrived and un-debate-like. They're more like coordinated speeches, although I was happy there was some interplay between the candidates.

British politicians, for the most part, are much more adept debaters for the reasons you noted - they actually have their positions and philosophies challenged on a semi-regular basis by their peers in a public forum.

[spamuell]

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Browsing a noted "right wing" UK daily newspaper

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I doubt many twoplustwoers know much about the Daily Mail so I'll elaborate, briefly. It's pretty much a low brow, very right wing tabloid, which is often factually wrong (as are many other newspapers, though) and is pretty much patriotic to the point of xenophobia. Columns are more often just rants in which writers impose their own moral judgement on people's personal lives. Political articles are little more than diatribes against foreigners. (Not so much Western foreigners as all the "fake asylum seekers" and other "illegal immigrants" from Eastern Europe).

[jakethebake]

The education system in the U.S. doesn't stress debate the way it used to. We don't want to injure our students' delicate self esteems. Pathetic. Is the Daily Mail the one owned by Gannett?

[slickpoppa]

First of all, you cannot justifiably make implications about the debating abilities of the politicians of an entire country based on a debate between two of them (especially when one of them is George Bush).
Second of all, Kerry is certainly no slouch when it comes to debating. I don't think that he became the top debater on the Yale debate team by accident. In my opinion, he performed very well at the first debate. Perhaps Kerry's debating potential was never fully displayed because Bush was not the most engaging of opponents.

[jakethebake]

Yeah. The way George kept yelling, "I'm rubber and you're glue..." really threw him off his game.

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Perhaps Kerry's debating potential was never fully displayed because Bush was not the most engaging of opponents.

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