Debate reax

Ezra Klein:

This is a pretty traditional debate performance for Obama. Strong on substance. Few mistakes. Little in the way of killer instinct or decapitating lines. McCain, by contrast, is offering an uncommonly strong performance powered, as far as I can tell, by his raging contempt for Obama. He won't look at him. He's using "what Senator Obama doesn't understand" the way Joe Biden uses "ladies and gentlemen." His constant refrain is the places he's visited, leaders he's befriended, aging advisers and presidents he's known. Obama is conveying the fact that he thinks McCain wrong. But McCain is conveying the fact that he thinks Obama an unprepared lightweight. One of these is a stronger claim than the other.

Sullivan covers a variety.

Nate Silver has hard data on voters' reactions which explain my impression better than I can.

Basically, Obama won because he did everything he had to do. The "connectedness" and "readiness" questions were answered quite satisfactorily. In simple terms, viewers "get" Obama, and understand Obama "gets" them.

How this will play out in the polls is hard to say. Guessing conservatively and based on the effect of past debates, perhaps a 1-2 point shift to Obama as low information undecided viewers begin to..."decide"...probably going to him by a 2:1 margin.

McCain certainly didn't do as bad as the campaign he has been running, which comes as a breath of fresh air to us all. He spent more time trying to attack Obama's positions than vice-versa and didn't look into the camera or towards Obama much; that was obvious. I was reminded of Hillary Clinton on a few occasions, but that was probably just in my head and a projection from past encounters.

My favorite was when he disparaged ethanol subsidies, which are a travesty, and advocated nuclear energy, which is commendable because it scares voters but something we need more of, more so than wind and solar.

Amusing was when Obama drew a contrast on renewable energies and implied that among other things McCain might not be pro-solar enough. The Senator from Arizona not pro-solar? C'mon! He just isn't for congressional subsidies on these kind of things. The energy bill that McCain criticized was bad and loaded with pork, but no one who understands this was going to have their minds changed by this debate.

On how it stacked up to years past, I leave you with Fallows:

When the details of this encounter fade, as they soon will, I think the debate as a whole will be seen as of a piece with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, Reagan-Carter in 1980, and Clinton-Bush in 1992.

In each of those cases, a fresh, new candidate (although chronologically older in Reagan's case) had been gathering momentum at a time of general dissatisfaction with the "four more years" option of sticking with the incumbent party. The question was whether the challenger could stand as an equal with the more experienced, tested, and familiar figure. In each of those cases, the challenger passed the test -- not necessarily by "winning" the debate, either on logical points or in immediate audience or polling reactions, but by subtly reassuring doubters on the basic issue of whether he was a plausible occupant of the White House and commander in chief.