Unlike the first debate of 2004, it is unclear to us who won last night’s contest. A Democrat weighted poll said Obama won. A Republican weighted poll said it was McCain. Frank Luntz said on TV that his focus group preferred Obama because McCain seemed old and lacked passion. Others thought McCain looked good, even on HDTV. TIME Magazine canonized Senator Obama.

Apparently a lot more Democrats than Republicans (by a 3:2 margin) watched the debate, which is interesting, but we’re not sure what it means. Neither side appears to have lost this rather tepid affair. Obama committed a gaffe, but it’s hard to see that anyone will care very much about it. We noticed Obama’s suddenly gray hair for the first time.

If one major purpose of the debates is for the American people to answer “Who do you want to see in your home on TV every night?”, then the first debate did not clarify the matter too much. But there are more debates to come. We note that the same pundit who declared John Kerry the definitive winner of the first debate in 2004 thought that Bush had turned it around by the third debate and declared that “this election is over.” So perhaps we’ll just have to stay tuned and see what happens in the coming days.

UPDATE — The more we think about the debate, the more we appreciate Senator Obama’s apparent strategy of making himself look like a safe and noncontroversial choice for undecided voters by, among other things, agreeing with Senator McCain on many issues, and even invoking (incorrectly) Henry Kissinger, a name with meaning only to older voters. Whether it works remains to be seen.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Polling, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.