The two best quotes out there about Saturday’s gubernatorial debate at Cal State Sacramento are from George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times columnist, who wrote in today’s column:

Anybody tuning in to the only debate of the gubernatorial campaign got a close-up glimpse of how these two pretty much conduct themselves in small groups or even one-on-one. Schwarzenegger: relaxed, confident, jovial. A better command of complex issues than one might expect of someone in public office for only three years. Angelides: Intense, wound up. A policy wonk seemingly trying to cover every subject in one long sentence.

Then there was Barbara O’Connor, the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Cal State Sacramento, also from Skelton’s column. Of Angelides, she said:

Phil’s better than he used to be. But he still tends to get shrill. His eyes dart. He gets that Cheshire cat grin. And he acts like the kid in school who knows a lot more than anyone else.

Skelton also pointed out that the format of the debate was awful. The debate’s moderator, Stan Statham, tried to keep the candidates on track with the “format” of the debate, which was meant to be conversational and did away with the normal routine of opening and closing statements and rebuttals.

However, the candidates ignored Statham and grandstanded with opening statements anyway. They interrupted and talked over each other. They answered almost none of the questions as they were posed, which was just as well, because many of the questions were piped through earphones to Statham via a real-time focus group whose composition and size were not, for whatever reason, revealed.

In the end, neither candidate did much to convince undecided voters that he was the candidate to vote for. Not that Schwarzenegger has any real cause for concern. A San José State University poll released late last week showed Schwarzenegger ahead of Angelides by a margin of 46-33%.

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