CNN

ABOARD THE ELECTION EXPRESS

Robert Duncan remains unmoved by either candidate

GOODLETTSVILLE, Tennessee (CNN)– Certainly there must be people in Tennessee who watched this week's Nashville presidential debate, felt inspired and exhilarated by what they saw on the stage, and came away newly energized about the campaign.

We’ll let you know when we find them.

Until then. . . .

“As of right now, I’m not going to vote for either one of them,” said Robert Duncan, 56.

He knew when the debate started that he was not going to vote for Barack Obama.

“There’s not a chance,” he said. “Too liberal.”

He thought the debate might persuade him to vote for John McCain.

“He could have convinced me," Duncan said.

But he said that he found McCain’s performance to be “arrogant and deceptive,” and that, with the choice on November 4 being between McCain and Obama, “at this point I’d rather not vote.”

He was having lunch with his ex-wife, Robin, 35, at a Cracker Barrrel when we spoke with them on our way north to the next debate in Hempstead, New York. Robin Duncan said that she is an Obama supporter, but that the performance of both Obama and McCain in the Tennessee debate left her cold.

“I would have been happy if Obama had taken the opportunity to show that he really stands for something, with real conviction,” she said. “But so often he just seems to sway about things. I would have loved for the country to have seen him and to have been completely sure that he should be president. But I don’t know that the country saw that."

Both Robert and Robin Duncan said that, as they looked at the stage in Nashville during the televised debate, they had an uneasy feeling that they didn’t see the next president of the United States standing there.

Of course, they almost certainly did.

“I know," Robert Duncan said. “I’ll vote in my local elections in November. But from what I saw, I just don’t have a desire to vote for president.”