McCain Challenges Obama to Series of Debates

The day after Sen. Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, Sen. John McCain immediately looked to take the spotlight away from him by challenging him to a series of ten town hall style debates.

McCain is calling for one of these debates per week until the Democratic national convention in August. He said that he wants voters to see himself and Obama for who they really are, without "spin rooms" and "process questions from reporters."

This move was carefully mapped out by the McCain campaign for a few reasons.

One is that Obama has raised tens of millions of dollars more than McCain already, and this would be good free publicity and TV time for McCain. Another reason is that Obama is a much, much better public speaker than McCain, and is actually capable of inspiring people. So instead of giving formal stump speeches--which is Obama's strength--his solution is to have informal question-and-answer sessions, where he thinks his vast experience will show.

It's also an attempt to keep the pressure on Obama, and not let him ease into his position as the Democratic nominee.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe issued this statement in response to the challenge: "The idea of joint town halls is appealing and one that would allow a great conversation to take place about the need to change the direction of this country."

Plouffe also added that he wanted to make some minor changes to the format: "We would recommend a format that is less structured and lengthier than the McCain campaign suggests, one that more closely resembles the historic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. But, having just secured our party's nomination, this is one of the many items we will be addressing in the coming days and look forward to discussing it with the McCain campaign."

The McCain campaign believes that they will fare better against Obama in this format because Obama is used to big rallies where he prepares what he's going to say ahead of time. They believe that he might slip up if he's caught off guard.

Yeah, that's real likely. We're not going to hear anything we don't already know, or anything even remotely intellectually stimulating. As the author of the blog on Electoral-Vote.com said so well, "it is rare for an ordinary citizen to ask any question that a competent seventh grader couldn't answer perfectly well."