Word: podium
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...doesn't speak well for either candidate. Gore tended to freeze ramrod-straight when finished, like a photocopier gone into energy-conservation mode; Bush had a disconcerting tendency to cross his hands in front of his crotch and sway, as though he just realized he'd been hitting the podium-side water a little too heavily. Sorry to be a broken record, but it reinforced the old stereotypes of each man: Gore as machine, Bush as restless first grader...
...want to suggest for a second that his overall affect, especially the sighing, didn't make me want to shake him. He looked like Sylvester Stallone, absent the Uzi, as made up by Madame Tussaud. The format brought out the worst in him. Put him in front of a podium and out of his Dockers, and he reverts to his smartest-guy-in-the-class mode, impressing the teacher with factoids for extra credit, like Serbia plus Montenegro equals Yugoslavia. His excess verbiage actually detracts from the more important point that he would be better handling the crisis in Serbia...
Ralph Nader has turned up the heat on the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) that excluded him from the podium and then from the audience at Tuesday's debate--and a Harvard Law School (HLS) organization may benefit...
...Maybe it was the format - certainly Cheney seems happier around a table than behind a podium. It could have been the opening pledge, Lieberman's let's-be-nice-tonight version of the Al Gore and Jack Kemp football-for-chlorofluorocarbons gambit, but if it was it a gambit, it paid off for everybody involved. Yes, Cheney's performance was a bit of a revelation, mostly because it really didn't look like a performance (Lieberman, fonder of the Gore catch phrases but so much gentler than Gore when he spits them out, was merely as affable as expected...
...This was supposed to be the close-to-the-vest debate, the stiff, podium-chained debate in which candidates stuck close to their stump speeches and took no chances with attacks. It wasn't exactly that -- in fact, it wasn't long before a passive Jim Lehrer let all those meticulously negotiated time constraints go right out the window...