Reactions to the Obama-McCain debate
Pundits across the blogosphere agree that last night was a bad one for McCain. See why in our roundup:
Stephen F. Hayes in The Daily Standard:
John McCain had a very strong debate tonight. It's too bad for him that it came on a night when Barack Obama was nearly flawless.
David Kusnet in The Plank:
While John McCain's performance in the second presidential campaign was passable, he didn't do his failing, flailing campaign any good--mostly because he was unable to follow-up on either his new proposal to address the mortgage crisis or on his familiar criticisms of Barack Obama.
Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish:
All I can say is that, simply on terms of substance, clarity, empathy, style and authority, this has not just been an Obama victory. It has been a wipe-out.It has been about as big a wipe-out as I can remember in a presidential debate. It reminds me of the 1992 Clinton-Perot-Bush debate. I don't really see how the McCain campaign survives this.
In seriousness, I don’t think tonight changed anything, except maybe to raise Meg Whitman's hopes of becoming treasury secretary (again, really?) and three dozen hair transplant specialists’ of being the one to do Mr McCain's plugs. I’d be surprised if most viewers really paid attention for more than half an hour.
Rich Lowry in The Corner:
If McCain were running in a year when his party wasn't getting crushed by a series of calamites, he might be winning this race. But tonight obviously wasn't enough. Obama, meanwhile, just has to appear plausible and he did. In fact, he's a kind of genius at appearing plausible. If the Nobel committee had a prize for appearing plausible, he'd win it every time.
There was really nothing here that we hadn’t heard before, though Obama came up with a wittier way of making his basic point about Iraq. On some level, it’s not so surprising that we didn’t hear anything incredibly new. On another level, it’s extremely surprising to me, tactically, that McCain didn’t try to do something new.
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