I defer to Camie's superior instincts about presidential debates, but I was shocked (SHOCKED, I say!) about the limited discussion of China in the debate. Now admittedly, I was in and out of the room a bit and didn't catch every word, but am I right in thinking trade and China barely came up at all? Given the recent surge in China-specific ads as campaign material (which Annelise rightly notes has been going on for a time, but which seems to have hit fever pitch lately), I expected a ton of this whenever words like "jobs" came up.
Amanda notes that the debate went in a different direction. (Though I should say as an aside that "direction" is a funny word here, because at the risk of getting into the raw politics of it the main theme for me was actually Obama's directionlessness in the debate - which I read as spurred in turn by an uncertainty in how to deal with Romney's shape-shifting.) The direction of the debate. was not unrelated to IPE, just more indirectly related, I suppose.
Anyway, maybe the China and outsourcing questions will come in the next debate, which is focused on "foreign policy"? Or the third one, which is focused on (I suppose) everything? I find it strange, nonetheless, that this aspect of domestic policy barely surfaced. In part, I attribute this to what I would argue was Obama's really poor performance - he seemed to me rather ofter to forget he was running a campaign against Romney and wandered around instead inside his own head. Maybe that's what people mean when they say he sounded "professorial"?
D'oh!
In any event, I hope that by now (after looking at Wolf, Stiglitz, Rogowski, Coughlin, et al., Krasner, and so on) we all might consider that the distinction between "international" and "domestic" is a false distinction at best, and misleading and damaging at worse.
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