Ah, presidential debates. What a great social indicator for the political culture of our time. While I don’t want to take sides here, nor really do I care to get down and dirty (for it is dirty) and wade through the varied and banal ads, spin, blathering, condescending posturing, rhetoric, counter-rhetoric, meta-rhetoric, and who knows what else kind of rhetoric, I can take a politically neutral stance and point out that this Frank Rich op-ed piece has some interesting comments about the recent debate on ABC.

Most students of Columbia probably don’t need this blog to learn about Frank Rich, he’s popular and reliable. The reason I link to it here is because it’d be easy to pretend that the media doesn’t play favorites, and that the media doesn’t get submerged in the harmful political discourse it pretentiously and complacently believes to hold accountable. When the L.A. Times somehow intimates that Edward Said, a scholar of near-Olympian proportion especially at Columbia, is, to put it mildly, shady—and Obama’s in the story, so ohhh!—I don’t have a politically oriented reaction so much as just feel embarrassed for the journalism industry I wish to enter post-grad. (for stronger language re: the hackery, see our friends at Commentariat)

As Rich writes, you can remain politically neutral and still agree with the “viewers of all political persuasions [who] were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan. Those minutes were devoted not just to recycling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bosnian sniper fire and another lame question about a possible “dream ticket” but to the unseemly number of intrusive commercials and network promos that prompted the jeering at the end.”

This is nothing new, or original (perhaps some will find it interesting that the editor of an Ivy newspaper can be something other than naively idealistic about journalism…naive and idealistic, maybe?) but the least I can do is post that I’m “mad” and wish I could “not take it anymore.”

“But that remains on hold while we resolve whether Mr. Obama lost Wednesday’s debate with his defensive stumbling, or whether Mrs. Clinton lost it with her ceaseless parroting of right-wing attacks. The unequivocally good news is that ABC’s debacle had the largest audience of any debate in this campaign. That’s a lot of viewers who are now mad as hell and won’t take it anymore.”

Hell, I hope he’s right.

Last week was a busy one! Spec’s editorial board endorsed candidates for Columbia College Student Council and General Studies Student Council. We’ve tried to outline beforehow the editorial board—to be distinguished from the managing board (the newspaper’s editors)—arrive at the final argument each issue. But readers may like to know that for student government elections, we have a bit of a special process. When writing an editorial, we usually have one boardmember make phone calls, do some reporting and fact-checking, etc. For the elections, though, we interview all the candidates, grill them on policy views, and then try to reach a consensus. Sometimes, that consensus is easily achieved. Other times, it takes more research, discussion amongst the board, and sometimes a formal vote. The eventual editorial then tries to accurately represent the board’s full view—not only in the choice of the candidate, but in acknowledging the pros and cons regarding each, as well as commenting on the issues themselves regardless of whom we endorse.

Endorsing can be difficult. If two candidates seem similar, should we really choose between one or the other, and how so? As we noted in this editorial, we sometimes feel a lack of faith in the council elections. Ultimately, we opt to endorse because, especially if two candidates are similar, an editorial can help us and potential readers distinguish the subtler differences between them. With that as a mission, in the end…endorsing can just be difficult.

An unrelated note: Commenting has returned! However, we had some slip-ups. The new commenting policy will use a security question system to help keep out spam (the original reason we took commenting down). But the new system in our first week turned out to be a bit too sensitive, so some comments that initially were accepted somehow were lost. Since a few of these were about a contentious opinion submission on Tibet, a few readers wrote in asking why their (critical) comments had been removed. We apologize but it was unintentional. The piece, incidentally, was written based on faulty information, and we formally retracted it, removing it from the Web site and issuing a note of explanation.

Comments should, now, remain published once they pass our anti-spam system. So comment away, and thanks for bearing with us.

The NYC Board of Elections released its official vote tally earlier today, confirming that Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama 55% to 43%, a margin of over 114,000 votes. Most interestingly, check out the numbers split up by district. Neither Charlie Rangel’s nor Jerrold Nadler’s districts - the two nearest Columbia - were all that close, though the 7000+ vote margin Hillary took in the 15th District did not exactly constitute a landslide victory.

To top off an amazing election series, we decided to have a photo essay. The point of the project was to give readers a sense of what the candidates went through before the results of the presidential candidates for each party. All the campaigning, rallies, and photo ops that our photographers had access to made for a lovely and appropriate photo essay. We hope to have many more throughout the year.