by Damozel | I thought Joe Gandelman absolutely nailed it:
McCain’s problem: for much of the debate he seemed to be still trying to win over the GOP base and Republicans. And in debate III he sounded far more conservative than in any of his previous national debates. What he needed to do: to win over uncommitted voters and independent voters who are concerned with issues, not character politics. (TMV)
The CNN article I just read it says the same thing in a lot more words. Though it's not as if he didn't win in any category. Look:
McCain won in two categories. Eighty percent of debate watchers polled thought McCain spent more time attacking his opponent, with seven percent saying Obama was more on the attack. Fifty-four percent thought McCain seemed more like a typical politician during the debate, with 35 percent saying Obama acted more like a typical politician.
"Independents tend to prefer debates that are dominated by substance and light on discussion of personal characteristics," said Keating Holland, CNN polling director. "The perception that McCain attacked Obama gave red meat to GOP partisans, but it probably didn't help McCain with independents."(CNN)
He's got a round-up. I recommend it if you're interested in seeing a range of first impressions. I'm too partisan to collect a representative set. TMV plays fair.
Marc Ambinder, generally very above-the-fray in his tone, did an interesting liveblogs...interesting because it reflects how the debate came across to a blogger who didn't start off furiously partisan (unlike, for example, me).
Ambinder thought McCain performed better than I did. I couldn't follow half of what McCain was saying, but I wondered if it was because there is a certain LALALALALALALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU!!! flaw in my listening when he talks, since I'm so firmly opposed to him. Here's Ambinder.
McCain and Obama tied on points. Maybe McCain even won on points. Solid policy answers, tough policy attacks, solid command of the facts. The first and last thirty minutes were among McCain's best. (Ambinder)
Were they? I thought, against my wishes, that the first 30 minutes were pretty good (though I put it down to low expectations)....by the end, I thought he'd lost the plot.
But when Ambinder went on to explain his calculus, it became clear that my DFH filter wasn't completely warping my perception. In adding up points, he apparently didn't factor in the nonverbal part of the message. "Debates aren't won on points," he cautioned. His final impressions were as follows:
Every single attack that Sen. McCain has ever wanted to make, he took the opportunity tonight to make. Around 30 minutes in, McCain seemed to surrender the debate to his frustrations, making it seem as if he just wanted the free television.
His substance suffered; it didn't make sense at times. He seemed personally offended by negative ads; he tried to make a point about Obama's character, but all the sleight were those Obama allegedly inflicted on Obama: the town halls, campaign finance, negative ads, etc. He allowed himself to get caught up in his own grievances. It was just plain unattractive on television. He moved quickly from William Ayers to taxes without a transition. From Obama's opposition to trade agreements to taxes. No intermediate steps. Blizzards of words without unifying strings. (Ambinder)
Yes! That's the problem I have with McCain, even when he's sticking to issues: he jumps around from one talking point to the next without ever building any sort of case.
At CNN, David Gergen---who brings a certain detachment to his partisanship---discussed McCain performance. Like us, he thought McCain did really well during the first part, then started to slide downhill. "Like an exercise in anger management," is how he described the impression McCain creates. Gergen also nails it!
From Talk Left's transcript of McCain's comments:
It then hit the personal animosity of the advertising and then I thought McCain swerved off track...He got overemotional about it. He looked angry. And it was almost an exercise in anger management up there for him to contain himself. And Obama maintained his cool, and I thought that changed the tone of the debate and Obama won the last half hour. I thought Obama really did well on education, abortion and health care." Then the polls came in.
Nobody liked McCain's inability to control his expressions---the smirking, eye-rolling, and background sighs and huffs. Does it not occur to him how un-presidential it looked? It's not how I want to imagine the leader of the free world behaving in tense negotiations with, say, bad-asses like Vladimir Putin or Ahmadinejad. It doesn't foster discussion or engender respect. I've read in various places that he's always been like this and I've begun to think that perhaps his "maverick" reputation arises from the fact that nobody much wants to be on his side.
As Jeralyn said, "Nobody, other than the conservative base, liked McCain's smirking and condescending manner tonight."
Jane Hamsher says, in a post called "I Sold My Soul to the GOP and all I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt":
John McCain was in a tough spot tonight. He's tanking in the polls as he ramps up the personal attacks on Barack Obama, yet the base was clamouring for a knock-out punch . He had to throw them some red meat, even if it meant alienating the non-insane. There were landmines everywhere and McCain stepped in all of them. His smirking, snarky tone was decidedly un-presidential, and his bitter, whiny complaining performance probably satisfied no one.
It's notable that conservatives such as Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Buckley who have jumped ship have cited the respective demeanor of the candidates as one of the reasons.
Only the base---who are perpetually in a state of roiling anger and panic themselves---think they would be well-represented by an angry red-faced little man with steam coming out of his ears.
Ambinder: "Did someone in McCain's campaign forget to tell him about split screens? Pooh-pooh this visual stuff all ya want. It matters."
Not that Obama was free from guilt on this score either. Chris Cillizza says:
Both Obama and McCain seemed to have decided that the best way to nonverbally dismiss their opponent's attacks was to smile. It didn't work for either candidate. McCain's facial expressions seemed contrived, Obama's vaguely arrogant. Just a steady look into the camera will do nicely. Did no one learn from Al Gore's debate sighs in 2000?
Deb gave the best capsule description: It was like watching Bugs debate Elmer.
My main criticism of Obama is that he let what could have been a discussion of the standards to be applied in selecting federal judges turn into a discussion of abortion. Why? McCain stayed on topic, mainly; it was Obama who seemed to veer off into discussing abortion. Pointless. I realize that Sarah "She Knows Autism" (really?) Palin has been banging on about Obama's abortion stance, but would any "swing voter" be persuadable on that score? Doubtful. Again, Cillizza sums up the reasons:
Roughly ten minutes -- one-ninth -- of the debate was focused on abortion. The truth is that while many people feel passionately on both sides of the issue, their minds are almost completely made up. McCain may have stayed on abortion longer than many GOP strategists would have liked in hopes of courting those white, working class voters who tend to be conservative on social issues but it's hard to imagine many undecided voters making up their minds based on the candidates' stance on abortion.
The Anonymous Liberal felt, as I and others did, that the pundits clearly wanted to give this one to McCain, but that the snap polls---and thank God for them---prevented this. They weren't going to declare McCain the winner (as some did last time), only to be refuted by the polls. Which went overwhelmingly for Obama....
In the CBS poll of undecided debate-watchers, 53% say Obama won, only 22% say McCain won, and 24% say it was a tie.
The CNN poll was just read on the air, surveying all debate-watchers in general. It shows 58% saying Obama won, to 31% saying McCain won. Barack Obama's personal ratings are 66% favorable to 33% unfavorable, way ahead of McCain's score of 49%-49%.
Late Update: Some more numbers from the CNN poll were just read on TV. Obama was seen as stating his ideas more clearly by 66%-25%, was seen as the stronger leader by 56%-39%, and was more likable by 70%-22%. McCain did win in one category: He's the candidate who launched more attacks on his opponent, by a whopping 80%-7%.
Late Late Update: Independents, who made up 30% of CNN's sample, gave it to Obama 57%-31%, essentially the same as the overall margin for Obama. (TPM)
Mark Daniels says the party's over and McCain can turn out the lights. (TMV) As a progressive, I must say I haven't understood McCain's tactics. Didn't he know that it was Republican moderates who voted for him in the primaries? Did he really think he needed to work SO DAMN HARD to reinvent himself to woo the base? Maybe it wouldn't have worked anyway---this isn't a good time to be a Republican. (TBogg, with a story of a Republican pol in Oregon who refuses to put his party affiliation on campaign fliers: "Republicans: Less popular than a Scientologist with a cold sore selling Amway door to door.")
But maybe, if McCain had been a different sort of man, or if he'd had a different set of advisers, he could have led his party out of its Rovian chaos? Hmmmm. I wonder what moderate Republicans or conservative moderates would say about this?
Daniels says:
The best line of the night, I thought, was McCain’s insistence that he was not President Bush and if Senator Obama wanted to run against the President, he should have done so four years ago. The problem, of course, is that McCain has spent so much of the past four-plus years ingratiating himself to the supporters of President Bush, it becomes difficult for him now to separate himself effectively from the President.
John McCain was the only member of this year’s Republican field who had the ability to outperform the Republican brand and redefine the Republican identity in 2008, possibly winning in an election year even when all the conditions pointed to a Democratic victory, but an unknown entity, Obama, was his party’s nominee. Nobody seriously believes that John McCain would be the same sort of president as George W. Bush. But in a year of economic uncertainty and weariness with war, McCain’s shifts toward President Bush’s positions on a number of issues give plausibility to Obama’s claim that a vote for McCain is a vote for four more years of Bush.
My favorite line so far comes from one of the commenters at TMV,
More tomorrow when more have weighed in. Though there's really not a lot anyone can say that wasn't said two weeks ago at this point. If the conclusions really are foregone, maybe I can go back to blogging about something else?
Memeorandum has more....and more to come!
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