Transparent eye-ball.

     "Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all."

               Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836

People are scrambling to tell us what we saw.

The primary experience most people have of the Democratic Debate last night was learning what other people had to say about it.

Seeing isn't believing. Instead, believing is seeing, and belief is a social experience. Then we saw the media.

Last night Democrats had a three hour televised debate. I was in an airplane returning from watching events up close in New Hampshire and could not watch it. It means I experience the debate the way most people do, from commentary by others. Emails. Facebook comments. Cable news. Live blogging. Podcasts. 

NBC

I try to attend events live and in person in order to experience the direct, immediate unmediated experience of candidate performances that are in fact presented to a live audience. It is hard work.

The presentations of the major candidates are filmed by a dozen or so cameras and reporters. Then people see it on a screen and are told what they are seeing. That's easier and far more common.

Believing is seeing. A mediated experience looks for differences. I observed here in this blog that I attended events for Biden largely to evaluate whether he made verbal errors and whether his physical presence seemed strong or frail. I believed that was the important thing about his speech, so that is what I looked for--then observed I thought he looked pretty strong, somewhat to my surprise. What I did not write about at length was the denoted content of his New Hampshire speeches which, in fact are largely about the need to change the political and personal culture.

CNN

My overwhelming impression from seeing some thirty five presentations in the past seven days is that these twenty or so candidates are very decent people, and that all of them, except Marianne Williamson, are serious candidates. (Williamson is running for a different purpose.) They are all competent and earnest. 

The commentary about them focuses on compare-and-contrast. Seeing them live, one at a time, creates a different impression: similarity. 

All of them see Trump and Trump-ism as a bad direction for America, both in policy and in the emotions he has appealed to in pulling together his coalition. In the actual playing out of what policies each would advance and could actually put into law, there is very little difference among them. All will face a difficult Senate, all will have laws that face Court scrutiny. All want to move toward universal acres to health care, toward more inclusion and racial equality, toward some kind of immigration settlement, some action on reducing carbon use, and toward making taxes more progressive. They may describe plans and programs but in fact they are talking about goals.

Podcast feeds

The media commentary focuses on the horse race, the battle among them. It is the easiest to cover and it provides a framework for describing the speech. But that is an essentially media view of the experience. A reporter needs to make sense of it.

 Seeing them live creates a different impression, of a democratic process at work with a person fully ready and able to be president. One isn't seeing a horse race so much as a parade. All the candidates are traveling down a road, all essentially in the same direction.

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