From the iPad propped up on their table, they could see it was time to take a drink.
“Oh, third person!” all three cried.
They took a collective sip.
Erin Rafferty had an Upland Dragonfly IPA. David Roberts and Aaron Stepp, fellow graduate students in the Jacobs School of Music, held mason jars full of Upland Oktoberfest.
Rafferty found the “2012 Presidential Debates Drinking Game,” a publication of the Conservative Intelligence Briefing, on a friend’s Facebook.
“Drink if either candidate addresses his opponent in the third person.”
“Drink if Barack Obama says, ‘Let me be clear.’”
“Drink if Mitt Romney touts his plan to create 12 million jobs.”
They came to Nick’s English Hut, loaded an image of the game on the iPad and followed along as the debate began on the screens above their red wooden booth. Their first drink came just seconds into the debate, for that address in the third person.
“I was in Dayton, Ohio, at a rally and a woman grabbed my arm. She said, “I’ve been out of work since May...” Romney said.
“Ohio really should have been one,” Stepp said.
“That really should have been,” Rafferty agreed.
Will the debates influence her vote?
“My decision was made long ago,” Rafferty said.
Inside the Bishop Bar on South Walnut Street, a television broadcasting the debate hung next to the chalkboard listing the beers on tap.
“We actually got a lot of phone calls about this,” bartender Stephen Wextrich said. “It was unusual for any kind of TV event.”
The booths, bar stools and benches were crowded with onlookers. As President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney fired back at each other and moderator Jim Lehrer, their voices managed to drown out the bands playing upstairs.
“I know the Bishop really is into this stuff,” Mike Truelove said as he sipped a Guinness draught at about 9:40 p.m. He’s been voting since Richard Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and he already knows he’ll vote for Obama. But he wants to know, he said, how the political flow will go.
“I’m hoping Obama will win, so if Romney does a knockout blow, which he hasn’t so far, I want to be aware of it,” Truelove said.
A few Nick’s booths back from the debate drinking game group, Charlie Cope and Paul Fry-Miller watched the debate side by side, sharing glasses of Blue Moon. Fry-Miller will vote for Obama. Cope will vote for Romney.
The pair was in Bloomington for the Indiana Academy of Physician Assistant’s fall conference. If they weren’t watching it at Nick’s, where they’d had dinner, they’d watch it elsewhere.
Fry-Miller said he doesn’t like to see the polarization that often comes with opposing views. It breaks down communication. With this new dinner-mate, he could be civil.
“Maybe we should get all of Congress to sit down over a few beers,” Cope said.
