We TiVo’d the last debate, and watched it again just now. Others have summarized it much more pithily, or eviscerated the candidates with more gusto, but I’d like to offer a small observation, a small suggestion in hind-sight that perhaps would have moved some voters from column A to column B.
When discussing a Constitutional right to privacy, Senator Obama ranked it with the First Amendment, and then groped for some other Very Important Right to use as a second example. The transcript doesn’t show the hesitation between “than” and “many.”
And I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.
At that point, right there, Obama should have said “the Second Amendment.”