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So about 600 or so of my closest friends joined us at the Northland Inn in Brooklyn Park last night for the first ever debate, anywhere in the world, between nationally-syndicated conservative and liberal talk show hosts. Michael Medved took on Ed Schultz in the two-hour “Donnybrook in Brooklyn Park”. The event was jointly sponsored - this may be a national first - by AM950 Air America Minnesota and AM1280 The Patriot.
I co-MCed the event with former Minnesota state representative Matt Entenza. We did a point-counterpoint format, switching off between me questioning Schultz and Entenza querying Medved. Each response got two minutes; the other party got a minute’s rebuttal; if needed the original respondant got a minute worth of redirect.
Well, officially, anyway. There were a few times it was hard to control the flow of things - but we did our best.
A few random observations, in no particular order:
- Advance ticket sales as of the day before the event were roughly 4-1 in favor of AM1280 fans. The lefties hit the doors late, however, so I estimate the crowd ended up about 2.5 or 3 to 1 conservative.
- The lefties, however, made up for the numerical disadvantage with…er, enthusiasm. Not that that was a bad thing; it was a fun evening.
- While I’ll admit my bias, I think it’s fair to say that Medved won on knowledge of facts and their coherent, articulate presentation.
- What Schultz lacked in knowledge and ability to answer a question, however, he more than made up for with sheer volume. He attacked the podium for every question, no matter how innocuous, at top volume, barely needing a microphone most of the night. Face red, veins bulging, fingers poking the air in front of him for emphasis, he looked a bit like a banana-republic dictator on the dais. But in a good way.
- Schultz had a very politician-like tendency to dodge the questions that were asked, and swerved handily into Carville/Begala-caliber snarking points as a substitute for actual command of the issues.
- The audience was…let’s just say “animated”. In the interest of fairness, the heckling was bipartisan (although there were a group of people down to stage-left that were, I’ll be polite, bellowing like baying dogs at Medved).
- The first half of the debate involved questions from Entenza and I. For the second half, we took questions from the audience, on written index cards. We found a lot of good ones - Entenza and I probably had 100 questions to sort through. But there were some others and…well, let’s just say that I gotta shout out to America’s talk show phone screeners on the left and the right. Whoooie. It’s a tough job.
Leftyblogger Gavin Sullivan was there with a camera and his own review.
If you were there, feel free to drop a comment.
Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark. |
