I was rooting for Barack Obama last night, I really was. I want this primary race to be a fight to the finish. But although Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy views were the hotly contested subjects of almost an hour of last night's debate, Obama seemed to sideline himself during the conversation as Edwards, Biden, and Dodd critiqued her judgment. Again Obama bragged about his early opposition to the Iraq war without naming names. Most disappointingly, I found his answers to many questions to be soporific, rambling, and tentative. I bit my lip a few times when he spoke -- he just seemed uncomfortable, especially when, like a boy talking to his teacher, he apologized for taking too much time in the lightning round. He had a few funny lines in response to stupid questions, like whether he believed in the afterlife ("I believe in life right here"). And he dealt well with a surprise question on what he'd be for Halloween: a two-faced Mitt Romney. But those moments were few and far between. The Social Security conversation was terrible for him; Hillary was right to repeat that protecting benefits is more important than dealing with what Professor Obama termed the "actuarial gap." And why won't any candidate stand up to Tim Russert and say, "You know what, protecting Social Security against Bush's privatization scheme was a major accomplishment of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Democrats, and I intend to govern in that tradition?" I've thought Hillary was the clear "winner" of the past Democratic debates. To me, the story from last night was less Clinton's ability to keep her cool under attack (although she mostly did) than Obama's failure to cast himself rhetorically as a leader among the rest of the field -- the one viable alternative. --Dana Goldstein
