If it had been a VFW convention, John McCain would have won last night's debate in a walk. He'd been there. Knew the pain of a defeated American army. Knew Kissinger almost before Kissinger knew English. Knew Eisenhower had composed a resignation letter in case the Normandy invasion had failed. Knew about Ike's resignation letter even though it never existed: Eisenhower wrote a letter accepting all the blame in case the invasion failed, but made no reference whatsoever to resigning.
But who cares? When it helped him and when it didn't, McCain provided the better theater in last night's debate.
More importantly, McCain punched and Barack Obama counter-punched through much of their first debate. This was to have been expected during the portion of the debate that concerned foreign and military policy, but not during the first half, which concerned the economy. With American capitalism floundering, McCain led America into the cul-de-sac of the earmarks scandal, even though earmarks constitute slightly more than one percent of the federal budget one-tenth of one percent of the GDP. Obama countered with references to real economic issues -- rising health care costs, college becoming unaffordable, his plan to provide tax cuts to ordinary families -- but he never actually went after McCain on the economy. Or, more precisely, his attacks never quite rose to the level of soundbites, of zingers, of the stuff that makes debates memorable.
Obama was also hamstrung by moderator Jim Lehrer's insistence that upon taking office, the first duty of the next president will be to cut spending. Obama affirmed that he wouldn't cut spending on crucial priorities -- energy independence, education, health care -- but declined to challenge the question's ideological bias by making the point that in a recession, cutting spending merely deepens the recession. He probably decided that there was no point refuting the near-consensual idiocy of the American establishment.
Oddly, Obama came closest to a soundbite not during the first half of the debate, but only after the discussion turned to foreign policy, when he recounted all the rosy predictions that McCain had made about the Iraqi War at its outset. But in both halves of the debate, McCain attacked and Obama largely defended. As the evening progressed, Obama's counter-punches grew abler, and he certainly conveyed a surer grasp than McCain of the global landscape, of the big picture, of the ability to distinguish main issues (the decline of our national economic power, the need to restore our soft power in a world that has grown to disdain us).
And as the evening progressed, McCain's trips down memory lane and his refusal to acknowledge Obama's knowledge -- the problem with the kid isn't that he disagrees with me; it's that he doesn't know squat -- sounded increasingly strident, churlish, patronizing -- and old. The insta-polling suggests that undecided voters didn't like McCain's attacks one bit; advantage, Obama, who went out of his way to credit McCain for being right, even on issues where hardly anyone on the American political spectrum holds views that are wrong.
It's possible Obama thinks he can counter-punch his way into the White House. He's fortunate that the economic crisis has prodded voters to pay more attention to the differences between his economic narrative and McCain's. It may take an economic crisis for white racial phobias to recede to the point where Obama is electable. Last night, Obama did discuss his vision for economic change, but not in a way that really took the fight to McCain, forcing him to defend his threadbare economic ideas. Obama was avoiding gaffes last night, and throwing nothing more than jabs. In the debates to come, maybe that will work. But with the economic crisis so clearly the main issue, and with McCain's record of support for laissez-faire economics so vulnerable, I think Obama can go for -- indeed, may need to go for -- a clean knockout.
