Caroline Fan blogged Wednesday night’s debate at a NYC watch party, attended by 170 people and which raised about $1,500. Here’s her blog entry:

I hotfoot it over to the Obama watch party tonight, and I’m pleasantly surprised to find the room packed just 10 minutes into the debate. I see some people that I know from college and others who I’ve just met in the course of the campaign. “Joe the plumber” is a running joke that gets laughs from the crowd, and a few people have turned it into a drinking game. It’s a large and boisterous crowd, with as many Asian Americans as not. Fumi, a first time Obama event attendee, says he came because “I was going to watch the debates anyway and I thought I might meet some interesting people.”  The grassroots fundraiser tonight is being sponsored by NYC Asian Americans for Obama, South Asians for Obama, Filipinos for Obama, and Korean Americans for Political Advancement.
 
Andy Woo from Councilmember John Liu’s office says: “I’m proud to root for Obama, especially since he’s in our home state of NY tonight and we’re going to rally our troops to get out to the battleground states.”
 
The crowd boos when McCain says, “If you wanted to run against President Bush you should have run 4 years ago.” On deficit and spending priorities – Obama rebuts McCain by saying “Even FOX News disputes it” – a line drawing lots of laughs and cheers.  
 
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Is it just me or is McCain losing it? Not just the election, I mean. It. He’s losing it. He came off way more angry, aggressive, and just more of a general asshole for this third and final debate.

Anyway, during the debate, McCain kept referring to some dude named Joe the Plumber. Who is he? I do not know. And I don’t care. But Cho the Plumber, I know. And as you can see, the man is voting for Barack Obama. (Thanks Esther.)

Cross-posted with permission from Angry Asian Man.

The the Founder of Asian Americans for Obama, Ramey Ko and the Founder of Asian Americans for McCain, Shandon Phan, came to the University of Texas at Austin to debate, defend and promote their candidate’s benefits to the Asian American community.

The Final Question: Do either of you think the campaigns overlook the 15 Million Asian Americans in this country and What should Asian Americans do to become a more recognized voting block?

A montage of McCain’s many patronizing moments, thanks to DailyKosTV. I love the Internet!

Tonight, we saw yet again that the opinions of the pundits and analysts on the news channels are no more insightful than anyone else’s. They, like us, are simply guessing - an educated guess, to be sure, but no better informed or more likely to be accurate than the guess of any politically engaged person. The difference between this election season and those in the past is that thanks to innovation and technology, the pundits have been forced to open up the conversation. In past years, the pundits could ponder and prognosticate for hours, days, and weeks without the inconvenience of confronting contrary evidence or perspectives, allowing a handful of folks to set the conventional wisdom. The winner of a debate was who the pundits picked as the winner, and the rest of us accepted it because we heard little disagreement when we turned on the TV or picked up the paper.

But thanks to snap polls and a brigade of citizen journalists, analysts, and fact-checkers on the Internet, we now see clearly that the pundits have no clothes. Immediately at the close of today’s debate, CNN’s team of wise men and women proclaimed this Obama’s worst debate and McCain’s best. Within minutes, they were scrambling to reinterpret their initial responses in light of their own poll results and insisting that they knew McCain had lost it all along.

For polling and my own equally inconsequential take on the night, go below the fold.

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Since I was teaching tonight (yes, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is still the greatest book ever), I tuned in to the debate just in time to hear the first word out of John McCain’s mouth be “Ayers.” Yes, it was McCain Gone Wild, in last-chance mode, throwing every attack he could think of at Barack Obama.

But as with the two previous debates, it was McCain, not Obama, who was the story: Angry McCain, seething with barely controlled rage, condescending, grimacing, rolling his eyes, even getting in a good snort at the end. And in the face of it, Obama was cool, cool, cool, never taking the bait or letting McCain get under his skin, playing his own game. It’s exactly what he did brilliantly the past two debates. And it’s why the snap polls (results below the fold) show a third straight strong Obama win.

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Phonebanking
Date: Saturday, October 11, 2008
Time: 10:00 am to 2:00 pm
Location: 939 Market Street, 5^th Street, San Francisco, CA
Details: We’re in the home-stretch of this historic election. California volunteers can make a huge difference by making phone calls to Nevada. Join the effort now! No experience necessary - we’ll train you on-site. If you cannot come down to our office to phonebank, please call from home. Click here to find out how. You can also follow the steps below to know how:
1. Go to www.barackobama.com 2. Scroll down and find the “Make a Difference” section. It’s in the middle of the webpage on the right. 3. Click on “Talk to Voters” 4. Login or create an account 5. Click on “Californians Call Nevadans.” 6. Click on the “Join Campaign” button 7. Click on the “Make Calls Now” button and get started!

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C.N. Le of Asian-Nation brings us his reaction to McCain’s by-now infamous reference to Obama as “that one”:

My wife and I just finished watching the second debate between Obama and McCain and I feel compelled to write about what I thought was the one moment that stood out the most for me in the entire debate — when McCain called Obama “That one.”

McCain seemed intent on belittling Obama all night, which by itself is very disrespectful and juvenile. But it was about halfway through the debate and McCain was talking about environmental policies when he said something to the effect, “You know who voted for the Bush-Cheney energy bill? That one!”

Excuse me?!? “That one?!?”

Continue reading at Asian-Nation. Thanks to C.N. for permission to link to his post!

And I thought the town hall debate format was supposed to be McCain’s forte. Well, if that’s true, it certainly wasn’t tonight.

Case in point, while answering a question about alternative energy, McCain pointed to Obama (but didn’t look at him) and referred to him as “that one.”

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Around the midway point of tonight’s debate, there was a long reaction shot on Barack Obama’s face as John McCain launched into another nasty attack. The TV cameras love to do this–in fixed-podium debates, it’s often through the split-screen–in hopes of catching some embarrassing or awkward response: the “sigh,” the “smirk,” the “chortle.” But Obama’s expression was one of utter calm: he was listening intently, watching McCain with just the trace of a smile on his face, reacting almost not at all. At 9:42 p.m., I changed my Facebook status to: “Timothy sees the Zen of Obama.”

Two minutes later I got a gleeful Facebook message from another Asian American friend of mine. At almost precisely the same moment, she had changed her status to say that she “needs to be zen, like Obama.” (Tom Brokaw must have been listening to us: he characterized the final question of the debate as “sort of Zen.”) That serene, reassuring image has got to be the take-home shot of this debate.

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