<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Presidential debates are generally pretty silly, but presidential debates about foreign policy are outright ludicrous. If we&amp;#039;re being honest, foreign policy is the business of lifelong experts who have access to information that ordinary slobs like you and me simply do not have, and even they don&amp;#039;t really know what the hell is going on. So a debate about foreign policy, in terms of intellectual matter, is as unsatisfyingly shallow as a kiddie pool placed next to the ocean. Despite that handicap, however, the final debate ushered in one important change to American political rhetoric just now: It was the first debate shaped, at least in part, by Twitter. Needless to say, there has already been some handwringing over what Twitter is doing to the American political process, and indeed to the human capacity for concentration. But Monday night was the first occasion when the candidates themselves altered their modes of presenting argument to suit the new reality of instant commentary via social media. This is new. Of course this particular change is nowhere near as important as the first televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy, which had 70 million viewers and transformed American politics, overnight, from a verbal profession to a visual one. Twitter is nowhere near as powerful even as Facebook, with only around 16 percent of Americans currently using the service. Twitter, however, is pretty clearly the social media of choice for members of the mainstream media, and that expands its impact immeasurably \u2014 and that&amp;#039;s what both Romney and Obama clearly noticed over the course of their first two encounters.  The early debates will be remembered for their production of memes. Big bird. Binders full of women. And now battleships. The two candidates took opposite tacks in dealing with the new reality. Romney clearly was trying not to saying anything memorable. That&amp;#039;s why he stopped himself at the end of &amp;quot;I love teachers.&amp;quot; Ordinarily, he might have said something like &amp;quot;I love teachers. They&amp;#039;re wonderful gals.&amp;quot; Or something like that. He probably knew, right there, or in preparations before, that something like that would end up on Buzzfeed, wittily repackaged in fifty different ways. Obama ran straight into the brave new world. Clearly the line &amp;quot;The 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back&amp;quot; was designed explicitly to generate a Twitter spike and it worked. &amp;quot;Horses and bayonets&amp;quot; alone drove a hundred and twenty-five thousand tweets per minute. #Horsesandbayonets started trending, and didn&amp;#039;t stop. Almost instantly @horses_bayonets launched with a single line: &amp;quot;How do I monetize this?&amp;quot;  How will this change the debates of the future? I love Twitter generally and I loved it particularly during the debates this year. I tweeted them all, and I love the other responses. Chris Rock was hilarious. Jeffrey Goldberg and David Frum could spot all the lies straight away \u2014 different lies, but still. It was all very useful and amusing. But it doesn&amp;#039;t take a Luddite to figure out that having candidates who play to Twitter is not going to increase the intelligence of the political argument in America. I would say that &amp;quot;horses and bayonets&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the 1980s called&amp;quot; are actually two of the dumbest things Obama has ever said, when you step back and think about what he was trying to say. Romney&amp;#039;s biggest victory of the night was imitating the act of speech while saying nothing. He blanded himself to the point where he managed to say nothing at all that anyone could comment on.  A week ago, we saw the terrible Andrew Goldman/Jennifer Weiner scandal take place on Twitter, and it was really a demonstration of the dangers of the medium. Both of these writers are intelligent and civil and reasonable people. On Twitter they became monstrous parodies of themselves, as did their followers. Weiner made a snarky, completely unsupportable assertion about Goldman&amp;#039;s sexism; he followed up by a crass insult of the most idiotic and mean-spirited kind; and then a chorus of nastiness jumped in from both sides. Pure ninth-grade stuff. Once off Twitter, both sides resumed being adults. Goldman apologized unreservedly, Weiner accepted and resisted the overreaction of calling for his resignation. What Twitter prevented both of these people from having was something they clearly do possess in regular life, which is grace in their conduct to others. As Weiner herself said: &amp;quot;[Twitter] practically begs you to type out your worst and hit &amp;#039;send&amp;#039; before you can think it through, and anyone with a Twitter account has probably written something they&amp;#039;ve taken down five seconds later, or thought, &amp;#039;Oh, wow, should not have gone there.&amp;#039; God knows I have.&amp;quot;  Twitter&amp;#039;s first impact on presidential politics has been fun and has added a level of urgency to the spectacle, but it has also diminished at least somewhat the grace of the proceedings. That&amp;#039;s too bad. Because if those debates showed anything, it&amp;#039;s that we need grace more than ever. We need about as much grace as we can get. -- CHARLES P. PIERCE AT THE DEBATE: Nothing Is Foreign to the Liar Willard Romney Anymore MORE THIS WEEK FROM STEPHEN MARCHE ON THE ELECTION: \u2022 The Second Debate&amp;#039;s Generation War (and Beyond) \u2022 Why We Need Nate Silver So Badly (Right Now) Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16389/twitter-debates-14005192/?src=rss>