I thought McCain won by a few points over Obama. I found the debate very frustrating because Obama gave McCain multiple opportunities on multiple topics to bring the hammer down. The debate was full of missed opportunities for McCain. He won, but he could have won decisively.
The format: I thought the format was excellent. Two minutes for each candidate to answer the question, then an open five minute period for direct exchange between the candidates. One of the worst aspects of our politics is this insistence that everything be spoken in soundbites. To see these guys given room to talk, for relatively long stretches, was helpful to the voters I think. I certainly appreciate hearing these longer exchanges. That said, both candidates, McCain more than Obama, frequently reverted to the most relevant portion of their standard stump speech when answering the questions. It is striking how many times a direct answer to the question was not given. It started with the very first question, about their stance on the current economic rescue package. Here was Lehrer’s first question,
Gentlemen, at this very moment tonight, where do you stand on the financial recovery plan?
After both candidates responded, Lehrer tried again, which I found amusing,
LEHRER: All right, let’s go back to my question. How do you all stand on the recovery plan?
One thing that goes unappreciated is the power that Jim Lehrer has. He and only he developed these questions. With only three presidential debates, and so much riding on them, that is an enormous amount of power. Jim Lehrer used his power well, asking good questions and working in his understated way to try and get the candidates to engage each other directly.
What I found most frustrating was that McCain let Obama off the hook repeatedly. Ed Morrisey at Hot Air notes about one exchange at the very beginning of the debate,
He never challenged Obama’s assumptions that the current credit crisis came from too little regulation. I kept expecting McCain to talk about the disaster of the Community Reinvestment Act, and the mandates from Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac encourage bad lending by buying up bad paper.
Another frustrating exchange was when Obama tried to claim that he had seen this credit crisis coming.
The question, I think, that we have to ask ourselves is, how did we get into this situation in the first place?
Two years ago, I warned that, because of the subprime lending mess, because of the lax regulation, that we were potentially going to have a problem and tried to stop some of the abuses in mortgages that were taking place at the time.
Really? He must have whispered it to someone. Given McCain’s long record of calling for increasing regulation of Wall Street dating back to 2002, he should have been able to hammer Obama on this, but he didn’t. Given the Democrats resistance to regulating Fannie and Freddie when it could have made a difference, he could have hammered Obama, but he didn’t. Given it was the Clinton administration that forced Fannie and Freddie to lower lending standards, he could have hammered Obama, but he didn’t.
During this exchange, Obama also had the most unintentionally funny line of the evening when he said this,
Last year, I wrote to the secretary of the Treasury to make sure that he understood the magnitude of this problem and to call on him to bring all the stakeholders together to try to deal with it.
No doubt, Hank Paulson found Obama’s letter incredibly educational. I’m sure he learned a whole lot that he didn’t already know about the “magnitude of this problem”.
McCain’s answers were ok on the economic crisis; I just was frustrated by how many opportunities he left on the table.
Speaking of missed opportunities, the one that had me screaming at the TV was Obama’s repeated insistence that Al Qaida is stronger than it has been at any time since 2001. While the Taliban and Al Qaida are resurgent in Afghanistan, the evidence shows they have been decimated globally,
CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week that al-Qaida is losing its war on the West… “Near strategic defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaida globally — and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’ — as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.”
Not once did McCain make this point or the point that Obama and the Democrats strategy of retreating in the face of Al Qaida in Iraq would have been a tragic loss for the US and major victory for AL Qaida. Instead, we followed McCain’s strategy, stood and fought, and defeated them dramatically.
McCain’s strongest part of the evening was when he schooled young Barack on the difference between negotiation with rogue regimes and presidential level negotiation. McCain was also quite strong on Russia.
Overall, a good night for both candidates with McCain coming out on top.