WASHINGTON -- Ever since Sen. John McCain upset then-Gov. George W. Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary by using the town-meeting format to woo the voters, it has become a staple of his campaigning.
His direct manner of responding to audiences with "straight talk" worked then and again this year in the same primary, when he resurrected his slumping campaign by beating Mitt Romney in his New England backyard. By exchanging views in this folksy manner with "my friends," McCain traveled a surprisingly easy path toward the Republican nomination.
His appearances, however, were no match on the glitz meter compared to Sen. Barack Obama's soaring rhetoric and dazzling charisma. Obama strategists looked forward to getting their man on the same stage with McCain in the fall debates that have become a presidential campaign institution.
But McCain and his strategists have come up with another, obviously self-serving idea. They are proposing a series of 10 joint town meetings between now and the parties' national conventions, with an initial call for such a town meeting over the July 4 weekend.
The Obama campaign has countered by suggesting a second session in August,
an "in-depth debate on foreign policy" that presumably would have the standard head-to-head format with a moderator.
Chances seem good for such an arrangement. Less likely is that Obama will be willing to engage in 10 of the town meetings that the McCain folks believe will benefit their man. Obama showed in the latter stages of his primary battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton that once his star was on the rise, his strategists felt less was better than more as far as his interests were concerned.
This year, an epidemic of candidate debates in both parties has flourished, involving new vehicles for public participation via cable television and various Internet gimmicks. While the entertainment quotient may have gone up, the substance has sometimes suffered, in trivialization of the exchanges.
During the early primary debates in both parties, the large fields of contenders often impaired lengthy confrontations, especially between the leading candidates, as the less prominent participants scrambled for air time. The occasional spectacle of a cartoon character posing a question via You Tube may have drawn laughter, but didn't do much to boost the intellectual content.
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