Blogs For Victory

McCain wants ten town hall meeting with Obama, Obama wants one town hall meeting with McCain. Team McCain asks again:

Just to reiterate, we have proposed at least ten joint town hall meetings once a week until the week before the Democratic Convention begins. As we understand your counter-proposal, you have proposed only one town hall meeting before the Democratic Convention.

In keeping with our original proposal, we are planning a joint town hall meeting in Minnesota next Thursday evening (June 19, 2008). We will hold time on our schedule for joint town halls every Thursday night until the Democratic convention. I hope Senator Obama would reconsider his position and agree to join Senator McCain as early as next week.

We have also today accepted the invitation from Mrs. Ronald Reagan, Lynda Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson to attend town hall meetings in July at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. As Mrs. Johnson said, these town halls will truly be an opportunity to “deliberate the great issues of our time.” Their sponsorship certainly meets our standards for a positive and productive opportunity for voters to interact with the candidates. I hope you will agree.

However, at this moment, we fear that our negotiations over joint town hall meetings are turning into a debate about process. That is exactly what we have always hoped to avoid, and why we proposed a town hall format that would render many of these process issues moot. As Senator Obama has said, he is prepared to meet “anywhere, anytime” for a town hall.

We remain committed to this idea because joint town hall meetings offer the best format for presenting both candidates’ visions for our country’s future in a substantive way. We have a chance to change the way presidential elections are run and elevate the political dialogue. Americans deserve this kind of opportunity, and we hope that Senator Obama will join us at town hall meetings throughout the summer months.

Obama is master of the set-piece speech – but away from the tele-prompter, he stumbles badly. Meanwhile, watching McCain give a set speech can be an excruciating experience, but to hear him in a town hall setting is a grand and glorious thing. In practical terms, the best way to get a read on a candidate is in an informal, give and take session of questions and answers – anyone can craft a good speech, but the real person comes through during unscripted moments. Obama wants very much for the American people not to get to know the real Obama – he wants to be that shining star who is going to make everything all better; a fairy tale which will fall apart on close examination, and thus Obama is wary of meeting McCain in a town hall setting.

And we can see why – his “bitter” remarks and his fool statement about meeting with foreign tyrants without pre-conditions show the real Obama, and also show a man without a grasp of the basics; they show a man entirely captured by the kook left and without any knowledge of alternative points of view. Obama wants to stay away from venues where he can slip into more folly – and he certainly doesn’t want to look like a fool in the same venue where his opponent is looking like a champ.

What will come of this? Depends – as long as Obama feels that he’s going to win this in a walkover (and all indications so far are that Obama feels he’s already President-elect), he’ll try to stay away from McCain…maybe agree to one scripted town hall, and one or two highly formalised debates, but he won’t want to mix it up with McCain. If, however, it becomes clear that McCain is either close behind or even pulling ahead, then Obama will be forced to get down into the trenches, or just look like a coward.