A friend e-mailed with an explanation of the convoluted Rocky reference Obama made during the debate’s opening moments. This led me to look it up on IMDB. The movie came out in 1976, which is about a decade before many of Obama’s young supporters were born. It seems an odd choice of reference for a candidate pitching himself as the candidate of the future.

–Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.