The bitter clingy gab fest. This is the political gab fest from slate.com for Friday, April 18th, 2008. I'm Andy Bowers.

As we head into the Pennsylvania primary, the Gab Fest team takes on the Democrats cat fight,

why John McCain sitting in the catbird seat, and why it was a good week for capital punishment in the Supreme Court.

At the helm today is John.

Hello, and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest. I'm John Dickerson here with David Plotz and Emily Bazelon.

Thanks for joining us. We're going to start with the debate on Wednesday evening in the city of Brotherly Love because you have to say that about Philadelphia because everybody else does.

Your reactions, David, to this important debate watched by 10 million people, a record in this political season.

There was a bad show they got.

They should have been watching, you know.

American Idol.

Well, yeah, the American Idol,

I flipped back and forth. I must confess, just to see. But the, uh-huh, just to see. And

American Idol was a lot better. There was a lot, there was a lot more action on American Idol.

It was, um, well, sort of the, I think the conventional wisdom, which is that it, it was

irritatingly long on the jibber-jabber fights that have been going on and kind of short on substance, and that she was better than he was.

You thought it was too long on the jibber-jabber?

You wanted more discussions of whether we should have a 28.5% cap or a 20% cap on the capital gains tax?

I thought it was, first of all, I thought that was, yeah, I actually thought that was a very

interesting question because I thought Obama had a chance to point out, but you can't do it

because that people take, you know, that they, when the tax gets lowered, people, the revenues go up because

basically people seize the gains from that moment, and that's why revenues go up.

And he could have pointed out that actually it's not a thing you can do over and over and over

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