Debatable

I haven’t watched many of the seemingly endless run of presidential debates, but I did catch most of a rebroadcast of the Democratic debate held in Chicago yesterday. They held it in Soldier Field with a large and vocal audience. These things generally aren’t of much interest to me since they are usually just forums for candidates to offer up their own canned sound bites; often ignoring the question they were asked. But the live audience at yesterday’s forum would get pissed when candidates avoided the questions and you would hear calls of “answer the question”. Ha, that made it worth watching right there. I kind of liked the audience participation.

The other odd thing I noticed was Hillary Clinton slipping into a Chicago accent from time to time. She, of course, grew up in the area and, like a lot of relocated people, lost her “native” accent to a large degree. But at yesterday’s event you could definitely detect her Chicago area roots in her voice. The debate featured a lot of questions from the audience and I suspect hearing enough of those folks got her talking local again. When she would do this, she reminded me of former Chicago mayor Jane Byrne for some reason.