The Biden-Palin debate suffered under the "no follow-up" rule, so here's hoping Brokaw has the good sense to press the candidates a bit. —Steve Benen

Right.

Obama is ahead and his lead is solidifying, so dull works just fine or me. (Not that I'd turn down a spectacular McCain meltdown if one is on offer.)

Ben Smith of Politico has taken time away from giving Jim VandeHei footrubs in order to post a note that says there will be follow-up questions. Apparently, while both sides agreed to the no-follow-up rule, they forgot to ask Brokaw. Brokaw says he's going to ask follow-ups, probably along the following lines....

MCCAIN: "....and that's why I'm a maverick!"

BROWKAW: "You were also a POW, weren't you? And you were tortured? So you have a great deal of understanding of what kind of pain America is feeling right now, don't you?"

OBAMA: "...and that's why I believe in change!"

BROWKAW: "What is it that you see as so wrong with America that we need to change it? Why can't you just love your country the way John McCain does? Or are you saying John McCain doesn't love America, after he was actually tortured for being an American?"

Frankly, I liked the limited format better....

Oh, but it's Obama's fault that the campaign turned negative--so declared McCain about a month ago--after all, he has refused to debate me in a Town Hall format.

Don't pin you hopes on followup questions by Brokaw. If they come, they'll like consist of fluffing for McSame and repeat smears for Obama. The sad thing is that the next moderator, Bob Shieffer, is probably going to be even worse.

Make it interesting. Have them piss all over their half of the stage, kinda like a lion or hyena marking their territory on the African plains. I'd suggest shitting on the stage but that would be of no help since McCain's shit has no smell.

After highly anticipating the first two debates, my hopes of a good debate this time are quite deflated.

So then, this is basically a press conference where "the press" isn't going to ask the questions and the podium has been replaced with director's chairs.

This is like scheduling a wrestling match where each wrestler is given a badminton racket and a shuttlecock and a net is placed between them.

This is a colossal waste of time. I'm really not interested in this so-called debate at all.

betcha...

I'll bet dollars to doughnuts with sprinkles on top...
that Brokaw selects a question about Ayers as the topic.

Any sugar addicts out there?

Steve Benen wrote: "... here's hoping Brokaw has the good sense to press the candidates a bit."

You can hope for a pony too, while you are at it.

On-Air Personality Tom Brokaw is a bought-and-paid-for shill for America's Ultra-Rich Ruling Class, Inc. and their wholly-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party.

His past performances as a debate moderator -- e.g. in a 2004 Democratic primary debate -- have been disgraceful.

It is worth noting the contrast between the right-wing attacks on Gwen Ifill's alleged "bias" leading up to last week's VP debate and the pathetic "sensible liberal" (which is to say "clueless") approach of "hoping" that Brokaw -- who is an openly partisan McCain supporter -- will have "good sense".

Why are Obama supporters not flooding the Internet and the airwaves and fax machines with any of the readily available, documented examples of Brokaw's bias in advance of the debate?

Why are Obama supporters not flooding the Internet and the airwaves and fax machines with any of the readily available, documented examples of Brokaw's bias in advance of the debate?

We're adults.

This means Tom will only use questions about foreign poilicy since McCain doesn't seem to want to talk about economics.

The questions are submitted to Brokaw, and he chooses which to ask? In other words, the "town hall meeting" is no such thing, the people and forum mere props. Brokaw might as easily (indeed, more easily) culled the questions from e-mails, and conducted the Q&A from the NBC studio in New York.

"Why are Obama supporters not flooding the Internet and the airwaves and fax machines with any of the readily available, documented examples of Brokaw's bias in advance of the debate?"

Because Obama will win the debate and trhere's not a damn thing Brokaw and his mush mouth can do about it.

I'm not sure this format favors McCain. Any in person comparison will not favor the bitter, angry, stumbling, terminal old man.

Why are Obama supporters not flooding the Internet and the airwaves and fax machines with any of the readily available, documented examples of Brokaw's bias in advance of the debate?

We need to be talking around the web today about how Brokaw is not an objective moderator. If they could say it of Iffel, then it is doubly true of Brokaw, who even today apparently talked about Keating 5 being ancient history. Can we really expect this man to give equal questions to the two candidates? If we were talking about this today on the web, our chances of his taking care to do just that would be far greater.

Talk about political theater. Brokaw could just read the best questions, if the idea is that he is too lazy to write his own, or if he thinks he's out of touch with everyday Americans. But to have these people read the questions he has chosen merely gives the impression that "typical undecided voters" are participating. Don''t expect any questions about environment, vote suppression, or what caused the credit crisis. Instead we will get gay marriage, flag pin nonsense, and talking to leaders of rogue nations.

Brokaw, the NBC liason to the McCain campaign, will select question based on an outdated sense of what politics has become. The Republicans always hide behind someone else's reputation until it's used up.

That's Just What I Said

Given that the questions are apparently selected from this Gallup 'list' from Mr. Brokaw himself, I expect that it's going to be tilted as much as possible to trying to make Obama look bad in his responses.

Watch the questions McCain gets and compare. Watch the follow ups as well - I suspect Mr. Brokaw will also be following a right-wing script. I recall his comments during the Democratic Party's convention in Denver to know how politically objective he really isn't.

My expectations are that this is to be a very one-sided tilt against Obama and for McCain, largely because I don't really respect either Gallup as a polling organization, or Mr. Brokaw's journalistic standards. I suspect the Obama campaigns knows this as well.

From MediaMatters.org:

On Sunday's Meet the Press, NBC's Tom Brokaw allowed McCain strategist Steve Schmidt to falsely claim that John McCain had called for Don Rumsfeld to be fired. That's an old lie that the McCain campaign had abandoned long ago -- but Brokaw let Schmidt get away with bringing it back.

Even worse, Brokaw ended the segment by announcing -- "in fairness to everybody here" -- that the "latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll" found that John McCain "continues" to lead Barack Obama on the question of who is "best-equipped to be commander in chief."

Yesterday, Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars pointed out that the numbers Brokaw read did not, in fact, appear in the "latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll."

Now MoveOn says they contacted NBC -- and "it turns out Brokaw was referring to a poll taken weeks ago--right after the Republican convention and well before Friday's big national security debate. And in each of NBC's last two polls, Americans chose Obama over McCain."

So Brokaw uses Meet The Press as a platform to (1) allow a McCain campaign strategist to lie unchallenged, and (2) to lie about the results of NBC's own polls.

The New York Times reported that Brokaw has "played a pivotal role out of public view, both within NBC and in its dealings with the campaign of John McCain in particular":

His mission, he said, was to assure the candidate's aides that -- despite some negative on-air commentary by Mr. Olbermann in particular -- Mr. McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News. Mr. Brokaw said he had been told by a senior McCain aide, whom he did not name, that the campaign had been reluctant to accept an NBC representative as one of the moderators of the three presidential debates -- until his name was invoked.

"One of the things I was told by this person was that they were so irritated, they said, 'If it's an NBC moderator, for any of these debates, we won't go,'" Mr. Brokaw said. "My name came up, and they said, 'Oh, hell, we have to do it, because it's going to be Brokaw.'"

So Brokaw, playing a "pivotal role" between NBC and the McCain campaign, was the only NBC moderator that the McCain campaign would accept. Gosh, I wonder why.

Actually I don't wonder why. Brokaw is a McCain partisan. That's why. And he will be shilling for McCain big-time tonight.

Maybe it won't matter to the outcome -- maybe Obama will hold his own against both McCain and McCain's supporter, Tom Brokaw. But that doesn't make it right.

Does asking McCain to answer the same question rather than dodge it count as "follow-up"?

Well, if Obama has any brains, if he sees Brokaw is in the tank for McCain, he should simply "pull a Palin" and answer what he thinks needs to be answered, not what Brokaw is asking.

That said, I have no doubt Obama can do this is much more subtle fashion than Palin's deliberate "the media hates me" in-your-face to Ifill, who just laid there and enjoyed it, or something.

I wonder what Brokaw would do, if Obama took Palin's route and said "I'm not going to answer the question. I'd rather talk about Senator McCain, who's an obsessive gambler, unprincipled scoundrel and an unmitigated liar. You betcha!"

Wouldn' t be nice if someone asked how the candidates plan to vet their cabinets. The one time I heard someone ask something similar to McCain, he said that he knows a lot of people. On the one hand that answer reminds me of the limitations of Bush's choices, especially Harriet Myers, Gonzales and Albaugh/Brown. On the other hand, it makes me wonder once again how he chose Palin.

Here's a lovely collection of videos showing On-Air Personality Tom Brokaw's obsequious, dishonest fawning over John McCain:

Brokaw Hearts McCain: A Video Diary of Love

This isn't a townhall format. This is a Brokaw debate where he picks actors from the audience to ask his questions. Because if he gets to pick the questions, they're his questions, no matter who originally came up with them. Why does anyone agree to these sort of sham events?

The whole point of a townhall format is that real people get to pick the questions; not a moderator.

Brokaw is nothing more THAN A USED REPPIGLICAN CUNT who frog jumps in front of McEvil, pants down, squeaking 'me, me, fuck me' ..........

As someone who is so fascinated by the accomplishments of the "Greatest Generation" that he had to write a book about it, it is odd that Brokaw seems to enjoy the company of such underachievers as McCain.

Biobrain states it exactly. This is theater, not politics. More an opportunity for T. Brokaw to show off his on-air bona fides than for the public to learn anything they don't already know about the candidates. Why else restrict the question to "uncommitted" voters?

I can't imagine all the concessions Obama has had to make due to his race. With his tone, with allowing Republican White Men to moderate two key debates, with refraining again and again against such a barrage of hate, both covert and overt.

How lonely that must feel. I say he deserves the Presidency for getting this far, for excelling beyond wildest expectations. For putting all that aside and holding steady, smart and strong.

What an amazing man he is.

I agree with 3:23

if Brokaw shows bias I suspect it will be subtle so he can maintain an appearance of objectivity

Somebody has to pick the questions, somebody has to moderate. There are 150 possible questioners in the audience -- and there have already been 6 million submitted on-line. Give three minutes per question, and dump the on-line submissions, and you've got 7 1/2 hours of debate -- without follow-ups. And a lot of those questions -- and the on-line ones -- will be duplicates.

I expect the debate may be 'fairer' than is being predicted. First, these columns have been littered with attacks on journalists as being 'in the tank for McCain' who have emerged as his strongest critics. Second, as the article Steve linked to earlier stated, McCain -- particularly in the last month -- has destroyed his 'brand' by his lies. Finally, because too many of you seem to think that 'fairness' means being totally slanted for Obama -- understandably because he's been honest and McCain's been a Republican. But your idea of fairness is being a left-wing version of Faux Noise. Look at how Rachel treats a Buchanan, or a Pfotenhauer. She lets them make their points, maybe challenges them, but doesn't spend the whole interview calling them liars and fools.

Besides, Obama doesn't need 'protection.' So far he's handled himself so well -- as has Biden -- that 50% of the country thinks they won the earlier debates, and another quarter thinks they were a tie. And this time you may see more fire in Obama because of the level of lies he's had thrown at him. I welcome a question on Ayres, on Wright, because I have no doubt he can answer it and make McCain look foolish by doing so.