Newsweek reports this quote from Barack Obama while he was preparing for a debate — a quote which, as an environment reporter, I absolutely love.

“I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f***ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective.’”

From an environmental perspective, what I like about this quote is that it highlights the needs to address the root problems of climate change and to come up with large-scale solutions.

From an observer’s standpoint, the quote confirms my longtime feeling that the basic format of these debates produces an outcome that’s contrived, rehearsed and insincere. The funny thing is, Jim Lehrer, who moderated the first presidential debates, feels the same way.

According to Lawrence O’Donnell, a writer for “The West Wing,” Lehrer told him that he has wanted to break with the format for a long time. O’Donnell tried to get Lehrer to appear on “The West Wing” to host a fictional presidential debate in which the candidates, played by Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits, would completely break with the usual format and engage with each other — ie., have a real debate.

While Lehrer couldn’t appear on the show because of a PBS rule that he wrote, he reportedly wanted to emulate the fictional debate, asking debate commissioners to watch tapes of the show to get some pointers. That’s why Lehrer tried to get Obama and Sen. John McCain to actually talk to each other.

O’Donnell talked about all this in commentary on MSNBC here.

John Nance Garner (Wikimedia Commons)

Despite Vice President John Nance Garner’s notorious description that the vice-presidency as not worth a pitcher of warm spit,” the fact is that the office, and who holds it, matter enormously.

That was true in Garner’s time and even more so today. Nine vice-presidents before him had advanced to the presidency, six by succeeding a deceased president.

Five more men have been added to that list since Garner’s day, three because of the death or resignation of the elected president.

And recent vice-presidents have been granted considerably greater responsibilities than their predecessors while holding the No. 2 office. Consider, for example, Lyndon B. Johnson and the space program; Al Gore and environmental policy, or Dick Cheney and national security.

Warm spit indeed.

What follows is a capsule account of the 46 vice presidents.

* Total number of presidential terms since 1789: 55

* Number of persons who have served as president: 43 (Grover Cleveland is usually counted twice — as both the 22nd and 24th president — so the actual number is 42)

* Presidents who died of natural causes in office: 4 (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt)
their average age at death: 63
average length of elected term before death: 12 months

* Presidents assassinated: 4 (Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy)
their average age at death: 52
average length of elected term before death: 12 months

John Tyler (Wikimedia Commons)

*President who resigned: 1 (Richard M. Nixon)
age at leaving office: 61
length of elected term served before resignation: 20 months

*Political party of presidents who died in office or resigned: Whigs: 2; Democrats: 2; Republicans: 5

*Average age on leaving office of all presidents who died or resigned: 58

*Average length of elected term served before death or departure: 13 months

*Percentage of elected terms interrupted by death from natural causes: 7.3 percent (4/55)

*Percentage of elected terms interrupted by assassination: 7.3 percent (4/55)

*Percentage of all presidential terms served in part by vice presidents: 16.4 percent (9/55)

*Number of persons who have served as vice president: 46

*Number of vice presidents who became president: 14 (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, George H.W. Bush)

*Percentage of vice presidents who became president: 30.4 percent (14/46)

*Average length of term served by vice president who assumed office on death or departure of the president: 35 months

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were later nominated in their own right for the presidency: 5 (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford)

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were later nominated for the presidency and won: 4 (all but Gerald Ford)

Chester Arthur (Wikimedia Commons)

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were not nominated by their party for a full presidential term: 4 (John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur)

*Number of vice presidents who assumed the presidency on death or resignation of the president, and their highest office achieved prior to vice presidency: 9

o John Tyler: U.S. senator and governor of Virginia

o Millard Fillmore: congressman (chairman of Committee on Ways and Means)

o Andrew Johnson: U.S. senator and governor of Tennessee

o Chester Arthur: Collector of New York customhouse

o Theodore Roosevelt: governor of New York

o Calvin Coolidge: governor of Massachusetts

o Harry Truman: U.S. senator

o Lyndon Johnson: U.S. senator (Senate Majority Leader)

o Gerald Ford: congressman (House Minority Leader)

*Percentage of terms of persons elected originally to the presidency not served by those so elected: 17.6 percent (9/51)

*Percentage of vice presidents who became president due to departure of originally elected president: 19.6 percent (9/46)

David M. Kennedy is Donald J. McLachlan professor of history at Stanford University. His book, “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Sarah Anzia is a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford.

With exactly five weeks to go before voting day, who knows what the McCain campaign is going to try next? August and September have been anything but boring.  And with a poll showing Barack Obama won last Friday’s debate, the prospect for an even more interesting October seems likely.

The American electorate has been on a roller coaster of surprises from Team McCain, including the selection of a complete unknown as John McCain’s running mate, portraying Barack Obama as the next Messiah, featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in campaign ads, high-profile media cancellations, suspending his campaign, and calling for the postponement of the debate.

These were planned strategies tactics. The list doesn’t mention the dramatics of a hacked email account, a senior campaign official questioning her own candidate’s credentials (twice), and a disastrous television interview which could singlehandedly resurrect Saturday Night Live.

If this was all in the Republican nominee’s Fall playbook, one wonders if the campaign secretly dumped campaign managers Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt and elevated Charles Barkley to steer the ship.

Without explicitly saying so, Orr has nicely illustrated the McCain’s gimmick-based campaign strategy.

With the notable exception of the debate — in which he had no choice — McCain has all but abandoned trying to create a cohesive narrative for why he should be elected, in favor of a series of high-profile stunts.

McCain does talk about policy, to be sure, but the financial crisis has made clear that the campaign has a problem with object permanence. For example, whatever happened to the “Mortgage and Financial Institutions Trust” he was touting last week?

Sen. Barack Obama may not be talking about policy any more than McCain, but his campaign narrative is well-established, and a lot of people are buying it. McCain’s presidential bid appears to be tied to the belief that the American public’s attention span is so short that if he can keep his name in the headlines by periodically do something outrageous or unexpected, he can stay in the game until November.

But are gimmicks enough to win an election?

Neither one likes The New York Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd much. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz includes this little nugget in his piece today about the media circus surrounding Friday’s presidential debate:

Outside, on a summerlike evening, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs held forth for the likes of NBC’s Chuck Todd and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who was wearing an Elvis T-shirt. (The company may have been more pleasant than that of McCain aides, who have barred Dowd from the candidate’s plane….)

Those who follow such things may recall how Dowd complained about being denied White House press credentials in the early days of the Bush administration — though she was eventually credentialed. Is this an indication that a McCain administration may continue some of the more petty traditions of the current White House, including shunning disfavored journalists?

Perhaps — but you need not worry, Maureen. It’s not like being on the plane gets you any more access to the candidate than you would have, say, sitting at home watching television.

Quite the opposite.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) (WDCpix)

For a man who had pressed for a series of town hall debates across the country in which he, the Republican nominee for president and his Democratic rival would travel the country like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, Sen. John McCain enters tonight’s debate as a battered candidate whose campaign is on the brink of a Kryptonesque explosion.

After having “suspended” his campaign for like five minutes to play the white knight who would save the nation from financial chaos, McCain has suddenly morphed into a figure of derision. He is viewed by many — most notably David Letterman — as an opportunist who used the economic crisis to display his executive prowess to the voting public.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Thus tonight’s debate–one originally tailored to McCain’s expertise in foreign policy–is up for grabs. It is the main event that McCain first attempted to cancel. Now, he has been dragged, kicking and screaming, to the podium in Oxford, Miss. Not a great orator by any stretch, the maverick comes in with exceptionally low expectations from a public that, day by day, is losing its faith in the economic engine that fostered so many American dreams.

For both candidates, tonight’s forum presents great opportunities as well as great risk. This is the beginning of the end of days for this election. But we finally get to see each nominee, without surrogates and press aides hovering, make a direct pitch to a weary, disgruntled public about why he is best qualified to lead the free world.

Needless to say, McCain’s fumbling, with a little more than a month left at the campaign, could not come at a worse time. But tonight, after everything that has and has not happened these past two weeks, offers the voting public an opportunity its view of the man once considered a straight talker. Tonight, McCain could well be that man again.

To do that, however he must rise above his party affiliation and prove himself, really prove himself a different man than the president and a GOP whose approval ratings seem to drop daily.

“We have real problems,” said Tony Marsh, a Republican strategist, talking about his own party. “What he has to do is rant and rave that we’re playing politics at a time when America is suffering and that his place should be in Washington not Mississippi. He needs to take the questions — and weave every single question about international affairs into the idea of America’s interest at home. He might be more comfortable talking about foreign policy, but at the end of the day he can’t afford not to talk about America and say what makes us strong abroad is our strength at home.”

McCain is not a rhetorical star, anyone who’s spent a day with him can attest to this. However, what he has been able to convey in what seem like countless town halls, is the image of a man standing on a firm foundation, someone who’d survived war and imprisonment, stood against his own party in the time of crisis for the good of the country.

“He has to look like he’s taking command of the economic crisis,” said former Bush White House adviser and Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez. “Presidential debates tend to personify what we think of candidates. It’s little things, quite frankly, that personify the impression the public has of you. It’s the personification that John McCain is a doer; and Obama is a talker. That’s probably the biggest point of satisfaction that can come out of the debate for him.”

Indeed, like George W. Bush before him, McCain is helped by diminished expectations. While Americans overwhelmingly have given the edge in the debates to Obama, the truth is that the Illinois senator was often bested in such venues by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries. McCain has the chance to be the counter-punch, the man ready to lead after we’re done oggling at the rock star.

“McCain just has to be solid,” said Ed Rollins, who served as national campaign director for Ronald Reagan’s triumphant 1984 run and, more recently, orchestrated former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential run. “He just needs a solid performance in which he shows his experience and how he can be commander-in-chief.”

This might be Obama’s debate to lose. But to win he must overcome a weighty obstacle: himself. Those of us who’ve spent time with him and asked questions usually get thoughtful, articulate responses. He possesses an intellectual heft few people have. But, at the same time, one can often feel him talking through you, as opposed to talking with you.

This is only magnified on TV. While Obama has tried to limit his use of big venues in recent months — with the obvious exception of his acceptance speech before 75,000 people in Denver — he still has struggled to move from the perception of a man who speaks down from on high as opposed to the man sitting with you, hearing you.

Indeed he might want to take a lesson from the problems of Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’s presidential debates in 1988. The Democratic nominee had been hammered about his stand on crime by Vice President George H.W. Bush’s campaign, as helmed by Lee Atwater. So Dukakis sat down for debate prep with House Majority Whip Tony Coelho and a young George Stephanopoulos.

Before the second debate, they talked to Dukakis about the importance of putting emotion ahead of an intellectual response. Coelho, in an interview this afternoon, remembered how they warned Dukakis that he was sure to get a question about what would happen if a member of his family was a victim of violence.

“I said ‘Be a damn Greek’,” Coelho said. “I told him, ‘Get fucking mad. Say, ‘I’ll fucking kill the bastard.’ Whatever you do, don’t begin by talking about policy and the system.”

Things, as you probably remember, didn’t go according to the script. With the first question, the CNN anchor Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

“No, I don’t, Bernard,” Dukakis said. “And I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We’ve done so in my own state.”

Coelho said that he and Stephanopoulos had done a high five after hearing the initial question, ready to declare victory. Then they heard their man’s response. Dukakis had showed a disconnect not only with the American voter but with the human race at large.

Bush could have announced he was Iron Man and planned on defending the country by flying through the sky with boot rockets, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Dukakis lost the day — and lost big when Americans cast their ballots.

“Does he come tonight as the law professor or the next door neighbor?” Coelho said. “That’s going to be the key. If he comes to the debate as the law professor — as Michael Dukakis did — he will lose the debate. He’s smarter than hell; and he really understands what’s going on. But sometimes he can come across as aloof, arrogant. There are a lot of words people use for it — and he can’t come that way tonight.

“Get out of the textbooks,” Coelho said, ” Talk to me as a neighbor. Don’t go for the brain. Go for the heart. How does he do that? It’s in his language. When he’s asked a question, he doesn’t start analyzing. He gives a human response, he shows his emotional side first and then the legal, policy side second.”

But haven’t we had enough, after two terms of Bush, of the guy we want to drink with?

“I think the thing with George Bush is that people didn’t feel he was intellectually curious, but the felt he had inner peace,” Coelho, who served as chairman of Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, said. “They thought Al Gore was intellectually curious but did not have inner peace. Now, with John McCain they know he’s intellectually curious. He’s not dumb. People want a switch. They want a break from the Republicans and Bush. The problem is they don’t know Obama.”

Dee Dee Myers, the former press secretary for the Clinton White House, agreed with Coelho’s “coolness” assessment. In many ways that aspect, his ability, to paraphrase Kipling, to keep his head about him when everyone around him is losing his, is a “rear-view asset,” something we come to admire only after the great crisis has come and gone. But now, before him, is a crisis of grave consequence — something Obama can easily lay at the feet of the current administration, and by extension McCain.

Thus Obama’s task is two-fold: Show a command of national security to a satisfactory level, stripping McCain of that card, and harness the nation’s collective anger. “Given we’ve got 30-some days till the election,” Myers said, “people are still waiting for him not to get angry but show real passion, show that he’s working on behalf of ordinary Americans.

“He also needs to call McCain out for what he is,” Myers continued, “the poster-child for deregulation. Say you believe in free markets, but with oversight. Say human nature being what it is, John McCain and the Republicans let the inmates run the place and this is what you got. Be clear on the specifics. Be clear on the ideological differences.

“We’re at the crossroads here,” Myers said. “People will be presented with two competing visions of America, two competing visions of the future, and ideologies. And they’re going to pick one. This is not an article in the Harvard law review.”

With the tonight’s debate, we can finally see the the men alone. It probably won’t be as entertaining as “The Road to Morocco” or any of the other buddy films Hope and Crosby filmed. But this is not a light comedy anymore. Tonight, perhaps one man can finally step out into the spotlight, becoming the leading man the nation has been searching for.

Last night, President George W. Bush helped to bail out Sen. John McCain following the latter’s erratic decision to suspend the campaign so he can come to Washington to help bail out Wall Street. Bush invited both candidates to the White House for a meeting with Congressional leaders for a discussion on how to deal with the financial crisis.

Meanwhile in New York, David Letterman was fuming over McCain’s decision to skip his scheduled appearance on the late-night program.

The talk show host spent a significant portion of the show riffing on McCain’s no-show…and then Letterman found out McCain was actually doing an interview with his CBS colleague Katie Couric after McCain had said he was rushing off to Washington.

Fortunately, the whole episode made for some good material.

While McCain was not appearing on Letterman, Sen. Lindsay Graham was telling CNN that McCain would not appear at Friday’s scheduled presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., if no deal had emerged yet from Capitol Hill on a Wall Street bailout package. You might be tempted to think, “Wow. McCain is really putting politics aside in order to get a deal. How presidential!”

However, Graham also suggested that if the first presidential debate had to be postponed, it should be rescheduled to take the place of the vice presidential debate next week in St. Louis.

Ah ha! The real motive comes out — and surprise, it is political!

Of course, yesterday Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin also gave an interview to CBS’ Katie Couric — the first installment of which aired last night on CBS Evening News, with more to come tonight and next week. So how did she do? You be the judge:

Palin is not exactly wowing the critics here.

You can see why the McCain campaign might have a clear interest in buying some more time before tossing her into the ring with a seasoned debater like Sen. Joe Biden. Unfortunately for the McCain camp, some Congressional leaders are assuring that a deal will be reached, possibly as early as today — so the question of whether to postpone any debates could all be academic.

Still, it remains to be seen how McCain’s frenetic behavior yesterday will affect his campaign. Marc Ambinder called it, “potentially fatal.” Time’s Mark Halperin hands Democrats the “easy win” for the week.

Whatever the final judgment, McCain may have raised serious questions about his demeanor this week.

From our sister site, The Colorado Independent:

The memo, titled “TALKING POINTS: SUSPENDING THE CAMPAIGN,” includes a list of points the campaign wants emphasized, and includes this warning from Kise: “Please do not proactively reach out to the media on this.”

McCain’s plans to stop campaigning — and a proposal to cancel Friday’s debate with Obama — had already been widely reported Wednesday afternoon.

Still, Kise was surprised at his e-mail snafu, as Pelzer reports:

Told by a reporter that the e-mail had been sent to him and others in the media, Kise said, “F*ck, tell me I didn’t send it to the wrong list.”

Kise said the talking points were meant for McCain volunteers.

Among the document’s “Topline Messaging”:

• To address our nation’s financial crisis, John McCain will suspend his campaign and return to Washington. He has spoken to Sen. Obama and informed him of his decision and asked Sen. Obama to join him. The campaign is suspending its advertising and fund-raising.

Obama spokesperson Bill Burton, clearly, didn’t get Kise’s memo. As TPM reports, Burton challenged the McCain campaign’s assertion that McCain “asked Sen. Obama to join him,” saying it was the Obama campaign that first broached the possibility of joint action on the financial crisis:

“At 8:30 this morning, Sen. Obama called Sen. McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, Sen. McCain returned Sen. Obama’s call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement. The two campaigns are currently working together on the details.”

Wednesday afternoon, Obama told a press conference he rejected McCain’s unilateral decision to cancel Friday’s debate.

Organizers say this is the “first” time that the commission has injected “online functionality” into the debates during its 21-year history. The tools is intended to “personalize the debates” and integrate “new media into the debate series.”

What does that mean and who cares, you might ask.

Basically, partnering with MySpace means the debates will be more accessible online than if the Commission tried to soup up its own website. The portal will provide another platform to view the debates, and debate them, while guiding visitors through a 14-topic issue quiz to assess the candidates’ views.

Politicos may balk, but young and undecided voters could find it a handy feature on a website where they already feel comfortable. Remember, MySpace is the most popular destination website in the U.S., beating YouTube and trailing only search sites Google and Yahoo! in overall traffic. It also trends more blue collar than Facebook, which began on college campuses, as Danah Boyd discussed in her 2007 essay on class divisions online.

Finally, the portal will solicit questions from visitors in advance, according to an announcement today:

MyDebates.org also includes a feature which will allow users to submit a question that may be presented to the candidates during the second presidential debate, a Town Hall format, moderated by Tom Brokaw on Tuesday, Oct. 7.

As I’ve written here before, though, handpicking questions online is no different than handpicking questions offline. The web provides more democratic and transparent opportunities, like open voting and “digging” questions. This gives citizens more influence over the agenda, and provides more accountability for how the powerful debate organizers shape some of these significant campaign events.

This portal is better than nothing — which is what we had last cycle — but it ain’t good enough.