The final presidential debate is now history and it proved to be remarkably free of foreign policy questions. Initial commentary seems to suggest that the overwhelming winner of the debate was Joe The Plumber. I’d like to repeat my practice of parsing the debate transcript, devoting comment sections for the candidates responses to the foreign policy questions. Unfortunately, for this debate, that proves to be impossible, since the moderator, Bob Schieffer, did not ask any foreign policy questions. There were passing references in the debates to trade deals (Colombia, NAFTA, South Korea, Peru) and the willingness of Obama to meet foreign leaders, but aside from those brief references there was no substantive discussion of foreign policy matters. I can certainly understand that on a day when the Dow fell over 700 points the moderator felt that economic issues should dominate the debate. Given the global context of the credit crisis, perhaps a question or two about American financial leadership may have been a welcome addition to the largely domestic focus of the debate.
