The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, October 17th. I'm John Dickerson. We have an all-star panel here of the entire normal. Normal's the wrong word.

Regular Slate Gab Fest, Emily Bazelon, is here in the room.

David Plotz is here. And we also have Hannah Rosen, who is a contributor for the Atlantic, but is also a member of the Slate family in many different ways.

A double X factor contributor. And she can also throw a manhole cover 50 feet. And she's my wife.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

But the least distinguished... The least distinguishing of her characteristics. But that will explain why Han and I are leaning into the same. We only have three mics, so we're leaning into a mic. Right. It's like an old folk... At home, you can imagine. But John and I have our own mics. That's right. it's like a hoot-nanny, you know. Everybody's going to lean in for the chorus of Willis Circle Be Unbroken.

And Andy Bowers is here also, all the way from Los Angeles, taking care of the recording of this so that everybody can get our every precious words, which will be about three things.

The debate, the state of the presidential race, and then the third topic will be a piece

by Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic on why he blogs or why he likes blogging.

And so to start, Emily, your reactions to the debate.

I thought McCain was really good for the beginning.

I thought he was clearly winning.

And then I thought he sort of lost it,

or maybe it was just that Obama was so good at playing defense and that more and more McCain had

this kind of clenched jaw look about him, which always seems like a bad sign. And that the Joe

the plumber, what should we call it, trope is not doing it justice, that this sort of snowball of Joe the plumber kind of took

over the debate.

For those who didn't watch the debate, Joe the plumber is a man named Joe, and I'm not

going to pronounce his last name, but Wurzelbacker, but pronounced by Senator McCain

as Wurzelberger.

...