CNN/YouTube Debate Post-Mortem Edition

• Love her or hate her, she's damn funny. Former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox wins the prize for best liveblogging of the debates, treating us to real-time snarky commentary on Time's Swampland blog. One of her many good lines: "In the comments someone said [Gravel's] ROCK VIDEO was the moment when this debate jumped the shark. The hillbilly q was the moment the shark jumped itself. The snowman question was the moment that the crowd rose up and jumped up and down on the shark." Techpresident's Micah Sifry says Cox is nearly as good as David Weinberger on a backchannel.
• We survived without Wolf, writes Air America blogger (and sometime techPresident contributor) Nancy Scola. After watching the candidates respond not to Wolf Blitzer but to regular American citizens for two hours, Scola tuned in to Wolf's post-debate commentary. "After two hours of pretty thick debate, what does Wolf Blitzer's wrap up lead with?," she asks. "You guessed it: 'Clinton & Obama clash.' It was on the chyron and it was Wolf's main talking point: Clinton and Obama go head to head on diplomacy with dictators." After turning off the tube, running to the store, and tuning back in, Wolf was still rambling on. "Made me appreciate Zach Kempf from Provo, Utah," says Scola.
• Colin Delany meta-liveblogged the event (I want credit for that term), linking to techPresident's Spencer Overton's posts and the National Journal's Danny Glover, Shira Toeplitz, and Andrew Noyes blogging on Hotline on Call and Tech Daily Dose. "As someone who generally writes essays rather than stream-of-consciousness pieces, I’m fascinated to watch these on-the-fly articles spring up. Writing them must be like trying to shoot a bird on the wing, knowing each time you draw a bead that dozens more will fly by in the meantime," Colin writes.
• TechPresident contributor Morra Aarons also liveblogged the event at Blogher, noting that "if any debate is worth watching, this should be it." She also had the chance to interview Anderson Cooper a few days earlier, a meeting which left her "buzzing."
• Jeff Jarvis was "sorely disappointed" in the debate. "I have no doubt that we would have heard far more substance without CNN and TV cameras in this. This should have been a debate held online: candidates answering questions directly without the need for CNN, Anderson Cooper, or their cameras," he writes. He finishes with the Yoda-like sigh, "A terribly wasted opportunity, this was."
• JD Lasica disagrees with Jarvis' (and our) criticism of the debate format, writing that it's fine that CNN decided which videos to show. "CNN has it right -- it chose a good selection of questions (that's part of a news organization's job) and showed a few of the more entertaining but frivolous ones, like the top-rated video about Schwarzenegger being a cyborg from the future," Lasica writes. And he disagrees with Jarvis' negative assessment as well, calling the debate "a refreshing change of pace."
• Over at the Politico, Elizabeth Wilner writes that "in this debate, the young citizen-questioner ruled... Just as the chosen venue of Charleston, S.C. provided a shortcut for the eight Democrats to appeal to African-American voters, the YouTube format offered an entrée to another key constituency: Americans aged 18 to 30." She also cites the irony that a YouTube-sponsored debate was being held at a military college, the Citadel, while soldiers serving overseas are barred from accessing the video site. So "as Citadel graduates serving around the world were unable to see it or engage in the exchange, the school’s president was taping a YouTube greeting" for the debate.
• MyDD's Jerome Armstrong likes the new debate format. "I have chronic anti-debate syndrome, and usually find the scriptedness of them overwhelming after about 10 minutes, and so have only partaken of them in YouTube snippits. It also seems to keep the candidates on their toes a bit more, or off balance, which is good too. I think the formats of debate that are done by reporter questions are weak in comparison." His colleague Todd Beeton agrees, writing that the debate's "user-generated question model of the debate worked damn well I have to say, unexpectedly so."
• Matthew Yglesias isn't impressed. "The results, predictably, were less entertaining than watching a DVD, but much less informative than trying to, say, read something," he writes. All politicians must learn how to pivot away from questions, and no matter what the format they'll continue to do so. "These events will remain dull and no amount of YouTube gimmicks will change that," he says.
• Howard Dean said last night's debate "brought the American people back into politics, which hasn't happened since the Nixon Kennedy debate." Now, how do we keep them there?

In Case You Missed It...

Micah Sifry posts an open thread for debate post-mortem talk.

Spencer Overton live-blogged the debates in eight separate blog posts.