Tomorrow night , 9 pm ET so that's 2am our time, here's some excerpts from a Washington Post preview article:

Karl Rove has said he doesn't believe McCain needs a knockout... McCain team says it will be on the issues - McCain is a bit more charming/folksy than Obama - so a townhall suits him. Will Obama be able to connect with the voters ?

cYp

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"Yawn , am I alive yet ?"

Obama doesn't do folksy, but he can do plain talking as seen from the last debate.

He still has a tendency to use more complex language and give answers that aren't pithy enough.

Obviously this is one of the main areas that his coaching team will be concentrating on.

McCain isn't exactly invulnerable to character attacks either:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/us...bling-web.html

I think McCain needs a knockout to stop the momentum Obama has built up. I don't think he will get one.

It will be difficult for McCain to go on the attack as the questions come from voters so he has less latitude to go off topic (you can ignore a Moderator but not Joe Soap).

Body language should be more fun as this time they've stools and are free to roam the stage.

Also this debate will have higher viewership as it is a Tuesday - McCain needs something amazing but I'm not sure that I see anything that works.

cYp

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"Yawn , am I alive yet ?"

No, he just prefaces every sentence with "folks"..not to mention his use of it as a preposition and for punctuation.

Maureen Dowd had a good piece in the NY Times about Palin's love of mangling the language.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/op...05dowd.html?em

Even if McCain wins this debate by a mile he has no chance of winning this election unless he can win resoundingly on matters relating to the economy. He would have been better positioned if he had come out against the Bill and placed himself well and truely in the sceptical camp. That way he could at least say look I said the deal would not work, we have just wasted 700 billion.......... OK it is coming out against Bush but so what.

Anyway 4 years of Obama should be interesting.

The town-hall format favours McCain. A turning point perhaps?

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Two words, "Jimmy" and "Carter"

Two more words, "crash" and "burn"

He'll do for black politicians what Buchanan did for gay ones.

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Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.

Reading that post, the two words "Brain" and "Empty" are what comes to hand!

Perhaps not.