Tuesday night, local news channel Koin 6 hosted a debate party at the beautiful McMenamins Bagdad Theatre. This normally low-key theatre was bustling with activity, from floodlights being set up for anchorman Mike Donahue, to the roving cameramen cruising for succulent soundbites, to the laptops being set up for the local political bloggers, to the technical experts who handled projecting the live debate on the large theatre screen. The house was at nearly full capacity, leaving late arrivals searching frantically for seats, while half the empty seats actually “belonged” to he people in the beer line, which stretched all the way from the vestibule to the entrance to the balcony.

The mood of the crowd was boisterous, there was a palpable excitement in the room while awaiting the debate. This mood was in great contrast to the tone of the actual debate, the two candidates for president preformed a mostly low-key conservative night where neither were playing to win, but playing to not lose. There was a definite Portland bias to the room, it seemed as if 95% of the people attending were Obama supporters. This showed up the most when John McCain took the stage and the crowd would burst into jeers and heckles for the would be Republican president.

The only times Barack Obama received unflattering heckles is when he strayed into his more moderate territory, when talking about energy policy and mentioning needing to make Nuclear part of a diversified energy policy. McCain and Obama went back and forth on nuclear energy, with McCain presenting himself as the true green presidental candidate, proposing to build at least 100 new plants. He mumbled something about Obama’s restrictions and neither candidate followed that point, which was disappointing because someone needed to talk about the catastrophe that is the combination of nuclear power with deregulation and lax standards.

Obama was also jeered when he mentioned his stance toward Pakistan and the need to go after Osama Bin Laden. It seemed as if the crowd was very happy to keep Obama in the constrained liberal identity, but when he came across as more moderate, or when he showed that he did have military teeth to back his diplomatic smile, his core constituents were less happy.

Overall the crowd was more entertaining than the debate that kept to answers that had lofty ideals and very few details. There were many shards of political insight being shouted to the screen, many ideas never even addressed by the main candidates. The overwhelming feeling of the night was that the crowd was tired of the mutual lies and the way each candidate stretched the truth, while still catering to the idea that Obama did scratch the liberal tummy enough in the right way to keep us giving favor, for now.

The debate ended and there was an open mike and discussion facilitated by Mike Donahue and Lisa Balick. They asked the most basic questions such as, “Did either of the candidates answer the basic questions?” People who went up to the mike urged the crowd to keep on Obama for firmer answers, and other people talked about all the domestic issues that hadn’t been addressed, many people talked about education policy and how basically nothing had been said about that, and they hoped it would be addressed more fully in the next debate.

By the end of the night, it was determined that the debate was mostly a wash and that neither party had budged all that much. If one candidate managed to look better than the other, then it was only by a small margin and the party constituents can dig their respective heels in a little deeper. Two contrasting voices spoke and the near end of the open mike. The first was military minded and one of the few Barack opponents in the room. He spoke of the media and war, and how if today’s media existed during the second World War, we would have had to pull out during the Normandy invasion. He then linked Obama’s policies to the soft diplomacy spread of tyranny and then walked out. He was then followed by a woman who spoke about the Indigo children who were sent to earth to save us, and she assured us that Obama was indeed an Indigo child.

It was a startling moment when the partisan divide seemed as large as the Grand Canyon, an unwitting tyrant to one and savior to another, and ne’er shall the twain meet.