I agree that the line of questioning employed by ABC's talking heads was dubious at best. But Obama missed a real opportunity to take those 'issues' by the horns and come up with some kind of intelligent response, one that took seriously the real fears about his candidacy that those minor issues represent and also demonstrated that his campaign is not bound by such minor issues.

If Obama was really the articulate, intelligent, golden-boy candidate that so many presume, I would have thought he'd have some kind of mini-speech prepared in the event that the debate's questioning should lead where it did. Instead he came off as waffly and weak, and now he's taking advantage of that by ignoring the fact that a lot of the voting population (especially those Independents Obama claims to represent) really does take 'minor issues' seriously and might have been assuaged by a forthright and earnest answer. He is playing to the Democrats' rightful sense of offendedness, which might work well for him in the primaries, but is not going to resonate with those voters we need to attract in the general election.

In my opinion, the questions about lapel pins and Wright and Ayers are all pointless. Unfortunately I am not America (and you can't too!) There are people with legitimate concerns, not so much about Obama's lapel pin habits, but about his past association with Jeremiah Wright, certainly. My dad is a hardcore conservative who has no desire to vote for McCain, but all he knows about Obama is that he attended a church where a radical pastor seems to have preached hate against whites, and now Obama is pretending he didn't know about it. This may not sway a hard-core liberal, and an Obama supporter can come up with any number of rationalizations and dismissals of Obama's association with Wright, but issues like this still scare the crap out of a lot of voters.

Obama could have used these debates as an opportunity to first intelligently and calmly assert his viewpoint on the minor issues, explain that, yes, he did associate with those people, but his views are his own and he does not agree with hatred against whites, and that ultimately, he thinks such issues are mere distractions from the the issues his campaign is concerned with. Such a well-crafted response could have, in one fell swoop, taken the concerns of independent voters seriously, assuaged their fears, and still gotten the point across that he is above minor issues.

Unfortunately Obama flubbed in a big way. It will cost him, maybe not in the primary, but certainly in the general.

Thanks for completely ignoring what I actually said. That was helpful.

If you read me again you'll find that I was not talking about lapel pins but about issues of association... Obama's past association with Wright and subsequent denial that he knew anything about Wright's fire-and-brimstone sermons, and his association with the Ayers person who is apparently a terrorist of some variety. He could have explained, to his skeptics, why those relationships existed, and explained why they are not important to the campaign. Instead he just waffled.

If you'd like to ignore me again so you can spew your self-serving diatribe, feel free, but don't pretend I'm the one making things up.

I'm glad you feel good about Obama and Ayers, too bad you completely ignored his much-more-difficult-to-dismiss relationship with Rev. Wright (the apparent black answer to religious bigots like Falwell, Roberts and Graham).

Too bad Obama has been ignoring it too. I'm not saying I agree with the people who care, but I am saying that if the Democrats hope to win in November, we certainly need to treat the votes of those people as important.

This is a dead horse, but give me the opportunity to beat it anyway.

First of all, I'd just like to note that Jeebery is the same pathetic guy who took the opportunity to accuse a depressed college student asking for advice of being a lazy, unintelligent, unworthy affirmative-action case just for being a minority at an Ivy League school. So I guess we can see how seriously he wants us to take his letters.

As for Brightstar, well, we already know the story there, sad though it is.

It is interesting, though, that Brightstar and others are the ones who claim to want to unify the sexes again... they pretend to even like the other sex, occasionally, for reasons other than wanking. They accuse feminists of being the only ones who have driven a wedge between the sexes. But frankly, that is ridiculous. All the feminists and normal posters here see a story like this, and they immediately comment on how horrible it is for people to take advantage of others for their money. We don't see this as a sex-based or sex-driven problem. We see people getting scammed.

But folks like Brightstar and others, who pretend that feminism is the only thing ruining male-female interactions, come in here and immediately, gleefully snigger that this is just karmic payback against women for all the mean, nasty things women have done all these years (which consists of... uh... the right to have a divorce).

The fact that they refuse to even see the huge irony here, the fact that they are the ones who paint this story of conmen and victims as men getting righteous payback on women instead of as online predators stealing money from unwitting victims, is pretty telling. No one here can doubt that it is Brightstar and his ilk, not the 'feminists,' whoever they might be, who take pleasure in driving a wedge between men and women even when the case here is simply one of internet scams.