October 16, 2008
Last night a mixed crowd congregated Downtown to watch the Presidential debate in style. The event took place at Downtown coffee shop The Percolator, located at Stanton and Mills. (An inconspicuous door leads you into a private movie theater complete with cup holders for you Mocha/Shiner/Latte.)
A good turn out meant a few tuts, claps and giggles along the way, which complemented the experience of watching on the big screen. (Politicians have big enough heads without projecting those heads on a 12 foot square screen). And when the debate got a little boring in places? Well you’ve still got your Mocha/Shiner/Latte.
“We definitely had a good turn out. More people are taking an interest in this election” said Bobby Smith, owner of The Percolator. And will the Percolator be putting on more events like this in the future? “Definitely,” says Bobby.
That's good news for Dr. Joseph Villescas of UTEP who organized the event. The event was born when he bumped into a certain Barack Obama in a Chicago bookstore last month.
Villescas thougt the event a huge success but is anxious to see that this sort of thing continues past November. He was keen though to stress the need to keep this sort of thing going.
“Is this all to end in three weeks? Are we really going to end all this apparatus in place that has got El Pasoans talking?”
“No mater who wins I see something that has never happened in El Paso before. There is a great level of awareness here.” For Villescas the event encapsulated his love for the city: civically engaged people of different ages and ethnicities to tackle the big issues. “This is El Paso”
Villescas hopes that the political awareness and involvement exhibited by the city during the election will transfer into the local scene afterward. “If this really does take hold then it can only be good for El Paso”
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Editor’s note: click here to read a story on this subject
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If you missed the debate, you can watch the whole thing here:
On a more tangential note, here is a clip from 1976, where media theorist Marshall McLuhan talks to a young Tom Brokaw about the debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.
On a more quaint note, here is a clip from the Nixon/Kennedy debate orginally aired in 1960