Unlike McCain, who is all bluster and agression, it’s clear that Obama would certainly first be involved in negotiations between parties. That’s perhaps the best time to begin changing peoples perceptions about certain events.

BTW It sure doesn’t appear that McCain always thought Putin was to be utterly mistrusted. In this 1991 interview after Bush made those “saw the soul” comments McCain comes off sounding more like a Bush lap-dog than a Maverick telling Bush that Putin is a dangerous devil.

When John Met Vlad

First some of the General Public responses. A CNN-Opinion Research Corp poll using telephone interviews with 524 adults who watched the debate and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Who “won” the debate- 51% Obama 38% McCain (13% break toward Obama). Some 60% said both did “better than expected”. 7/10 said each seemed capable of being president.

“Obama was widely considered more intelligent, likable and in touch with peoples’ problems, and by modest margins was seen as the stronger leader and more sincere.” The majority said McCain spent most of the time attacking his opponent.

And here’s some information on the Undecideds. A CBS-Knowledge Networks survey involved online interviews with 483 selected “Uncommitted voters” who saw the debate. CE +/-4 points. From this group of “Uncommitteds” 39% said Obama won the debate, 24% said McCain. 37% called it a tie. Most critically, 2 out of 3 felt Obama understands their needs than McCain.

The only good news for McCain is mixed- that 68% said he is prepared to be president, but this was unchanged from the same percentage as before the debate. 60% now said they felt Obama is ready — and while a lower score than McCain, it’s a strong 16% improvement from what the same sample of uncommitteds responded before the debate (44%). These numbers are pretty close to those in the General Public cited by CNN above. Far more said their image of Obama had improved as a result of the debate than said it had worsened. McCain’s image had also improved, but by a more modest margin.

All of this suggests that in what appears to be a very close race Obama eliminated a great deal of the issues that have allowed McCain to stay close. Given that the second poll were “undecideds” it could portend an even greater climb in results for Obama over the next weeks. McCain didn’t “bomb”…but it seems that Obama may be bringing on the undecideds.

One further point….race. Some recent surveys suggested than many individuals still have strong racial biases and this could doom Obama. I would like to make the point that while these are surely populational biases, they don’t necessarily carry over to “known individuals” who are seen as “exceptions” to the stereotype. I call this the “Huck Finn” effect…after Huck’s problematic friendship with Jim, the runaway slave.

The issue is on level deeper than is dealt with in our soundbite news, and to take it on would be to make a Kerry type mistake. He’d be right, but he’d waste way too much energy on the issue. One has to pick battles carefully here, and that is one you can easily be right on, and lose big time.

So why do most American politicians have to be automatically knee-jerk against anything Russia does? The old Soviet Union and its communist system collapsed in 1991. Russia is probably about as democratic as the US under Bush. I watch Russia Today news on a daily basis. They told me a bout hearings being held in the US Senate and House about the Georgian aggression against South Ossetia (only US politicians mostly prefer to call it “Russian aggression”). See http://www.russiatoday.com for useful information every day.

No need to push the man. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

What I thought might interest you was to match the comments up with the demographics of WHO was making them ;-))

That was interesting IMHO, if not altogether surprising.
Kind of ‘can you match this statement to the voter’? It seemed like a reasonably straight forward correlation, and in my view that underscores the kind of things that George Lakoff is writing about.