You have got to give this debate to Obama on points. What points mean on the whole is basically nothing, but we have to write something don't we?
Basically here's what happened. McCain came out spluttering like a clumsy brawler just trying to make the knockout blow, and Obama just boxed him two inches short of submission. Fifteen minutes in it almost looked like a TKO. And then on the question of negative campaigning McCain just stunned Obama with a neck-snapping reference to the biggest spending in history, the John Lewis statement, the broken promise on public funding and the failure to meet in many town halls. I say it was a knockdown with a standing 8 count, and suddenly it was all evened up.
After that they traded blows more or less evenly, got into some stupid clinches over South American free trade, disagreements over the average size of a health care premium and some other piddly stuff on vouchers vs charter schools. All the way out from there, McCain showed that he could throw a few uppercuts but Obama just rolled with the punches. Obama was able to get in a flurry of sweet looking jabs and even a dilly of a counterpunch on Joe the Plumber, but none of them knocked McCain over. Basically no more standing 8 counts, and certainly no knockout.
I think Obama showed a lot of class and did a commendable job of parrying a lot of old baggage that Right talkers have been yelping about. McCain threw the Ayers stuff out there with about as much tact as could be done, and tried to knock over Obama with an acorn. No such luck. McCain had some very clean hooks on the manner of judicial appointments and litmus tests. McCain also defended Palin admirably where Obama started stumbling into a neanderthal swing on her. McCain counterpunched well on Biden vis a vis, I think the word was 'cockamamie' foreign policy on the partition of Iraq. But in every other clash, the edge goes to Obama, just on style points - which count for plenty in a debate.
In the end, Obama had a much more elegant fight, he was able, slightly more than McCain get in words edgewise when he managed to change the subject. He's nowhere near as good at deflection and redirection as Hillary Clinton, but it sounds a lot more refreshingly honest. I got the feeling that Obama could be hurt but that when McCain lands his bombs he's not fast enough to do significant damage and Obama always recovers nicely.
So I wouldn't really expect this to be a split decision, rather a unanimous decision for Obama for getting two points up in a couple of the early rounds on the economy, and then trading rather evenly after the knockdown on dirty campaigning.
Speaking of the economy, I don't think either of them get it. Both of them promising to save mortgage-holders without even commenting on what TARP has actually done, how Bernanke is operating and why stabilization of the biggest financial institutions is most important was just awful. But McCain repeating himself on 'Americans are angry, and rightfully so' was just pathetic. Obama's namedropping of Warren Buffett, now for the second time, when everybody knows Buffett's not going to take any position in government was just silly. Aside from that, Buffett's an investor more than anything and I don't think he's going to do much more than profit from this historic low.
Both of them sounded exactly like Senators when it comes to putting budget cuts in perspective. Speaking of which Obama's antipathy for insurance companies was made pretty plain this evening which is pretty dumb considering the name dropping. But 15Billion of insurance subsidies gone? So what? And McCain talking about 6Billion on something else, whatever. This is not a tens of billions of dollars game gentlemen. Similarly their talking points on alternative energy continue to act as if solar + geothermal + wind + tidal power > .05 * oil. It ain't. But at least McCain did make the distinction on 'foreign oil' vs ME + Venezuelan oil.
Obama would have been a lot more respectable from my perspective if he would have uttered the dread phrase 'CAFE standards'. We all knew what he was talking about when he was talking about the energy efficient cars of the future. But that whole thing sounds goofy because it doesn't seem to me that he can force American manufacturers to built this hot new car and increase American product market share if he doesn't impose tarriffs on the Germans, Japanese and S. Koreans. Not like GM or Ford could afford it anyway.
McCain's spending freeze hatchet sounds nice, but Obama is probably right when he says it'll never happen. It's hard to see how McCain can steamroll Congress into doing that without getting a bunch of weasels under the fence, not with Pelosi in charge. Better to ask Newt Gingrich.
That's about all there is to say. Obama wins the debate on style points. On substance, neither one of them was particularly informative. On the whole, McCain lost because he's not fast enough on his feet to beat Obama down, and couldn't put together an effective combination. The Conservative argument that could have and should have won the fight was something,again, I think only Mitt Romney could have delivered and that was all about the reasonableness of even a 'pay as you go' plan of balanced spending that increases the size of the Federal budget during this recession. If you could go back and remix McCain, and put all of his combos together, he could have won the debate. But you can't, and he lost it.
Obama is tonight's master debator. (Snicker!)
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