Presidential Debates

Thursday night's vice presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden was seen by 69.989 million viewers, the second-largest TV audience for any presidential or vice presidential debate since Nielsen started counting the number of persons watching debates in 1976. Baltimore's TV market had the highest percentage of viewers, with 59.1 percent of TV households tuned to the event - about 660,000 homes. St. Louis, the city in which the debate was held, had the second-highest percentage of viewers at 58.3.

Sarah Palin, unfiltered, more than held her own on the national debate stage last night. She was folksy and charming and delivered her lines, even the stock ones, with conviction and brio. On style and charm and connecting with viewers at home, the newcomer seemed to have it all over Joe Biden, the veteran pol who dared to be boring at the outset and took quite a while to warm up. Palin locked into the camera lens from the start and never let go, wriggling her nose to take the edge off her sharpest lines.

OXFORD, Miss. - In a momentous first meeting, the two presidential candidates sparred intensely and at times heatedly last night over the financial crisis consuming Wall Street and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first of three televised presidential debates at the University of Mississippi came at the end of an already dramatic week in Washington and on Wall Street, as the administration, congressional leaders and the two candidates wrestled over a bailout package for the financial industry.

WASHINGTON - On the eve of what some are calling the most important event of the '08 campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain engaged in brinkmanship yesterday over his planned TV debate with Barack Obama. McCain appeared to hint last night that he would be at the debate, saying it was "very possible" enough progress would be made on an bailout agreement for him to fly to Mississippi today. "I'm very hopeful, very hopeful that we can," he said in network TV interviews. Obama and McCain met at the White House yesterday afternoon with President Bush and congressional leaders to discuss a bailout deal.

There may not be any more presidential debates between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, partly because of the bad aroma that ABC's interrogation before Pennsylvania's primary left behind in many noses. In fact, when you consider the rising risks that televised debates pose in the age of YouTube, especially for front-runners, we'll be lucky to see any more presidential debates at all. North Carolina's Democratic Party has canceled the debate that CBS had hoped to broadcast this Sunday, in advance of the state's May 6 primary.

Politics is a battle of inches. An expression here, a sound bite there can often mean the difference between celebration and commiseration. A litany of reasons has been given for Rudolph W. Giuliani's political collapse in this presidential race: He bypassed all the early primary states, showed an almost obsessive focus on 9/11, had dodgy associates and embraced a social policy agenda out of step with mainstream Republicans. True enough, but they ignore a more significant Giuliani campaign failure: the inability or utter unwillingness to communicate a presidential vision of America and the country's future.

JOHNSTON, Iowa -- The Democratic contenders closed out the pre-Iowa debate season on a collegial note yesterday in a televised forum that did little, if anything, to alter the tight three-way contest here. For the second day in a row, a Des Moines Register presidential debate was overshadowed by a candidate apology involving remarks from a media interview in another state. Before the event, Hillary Clinton apologized personally to Barack Obama for comments that her New Hampshire co-chairman made about the Illinois senator's illegal drug use; the Clinton campaign official later resigned.

WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama tangled over the Iraq war and outreach to America's adversaries during a novel TV debate last night that stretched the boundaries of new and old media. Opening a new chapter in the digital political age, the candidates answered prerecorded video questions that had been submitted online by thousands of ordinary voters. While the format of the event might have overshadowed its substance, Senator Obama of Illinois used it to attack Clinton over the consequences of her 2002 Senate vote to authorize the use of U.S. military force in Iraq.

WASHINGTON -- The presidential campaign debate about what to do about terrorism now includes a debate about how to talk about terrorism. While GOP presidential candidates are not shy about using phrases like "Islamic terrorism" that link the tactic to a specific religion, Democrats largely avoid that connection. GOP front-runner Rudolph W. Giuliani says it tells you something - something he believes is negative - about Democrats. "During their two debates they never mentioned the word Islamic terrorist, Islamic extremist, Islamic fascist, terrorist, whatever combination of those words you want to use, [the]