My sense of the debate was that McCain had taken the evening. But listening to the pundits afterward, there was this odd concept that kept coming up. "Obama held his own." You kept hearing it. "He stood toe-to-toe with McCain on foreign policy." As if he was supposed to shriek and flee the stage when McCain upon McCain's first mispronounced invocation of Ahmadinejad (as Alex Massie wrote, McCain sounded like he was saying "Armada Dinner Jacket"). But this concept anchored the instant reactions. By simply standing his ground, Obama had won. In part, this is a baseline that had simply never occurred to me. I hold John McCain's foreign policy in rather low esteem. It is wrong, yes, but just as bad, and maybe more dangerous, it is profoundly immature. It is a foreign policy built upon perceived slights, personal grievances, and pride. It is a foreign policy that would risk great power conflict because Putin didn't pass the potatoes quickly enough at last year's G8 luncheon reception. The fact that he didn't accidentally declare us at war with China this evening struck me as something of a victory. But that is not the broader media perception of John McCain's foreign policy. He is a Respected Voice. His authority is assumed. Admired. And starting from that baseline, the debate must have looked quite different. If you thought McCain the only candidate in the race able to talk confidently and fluently about foreign affairs, you were disabused of that notion tonight. Many in the media, it seems, held that notion. But for McCain, decades of experience, both as a soldier and a politician, did not translate into a measurably superior grasp of international relations. For him to fulfill his own public promises and carefully cultivate persona, it needed to. The expectations game is both unaccountably consequential and unsettlingly opaque. The line of competence each candidate must clear is invisible. It is not set simply by the campaign e-mails on the day of the event, but by the silent accumulation of impressions over a period of years, even decades. But Obama clearly -- and to my mind, unexpectedly -- won the contest tonight. Or, at the least, McCain lost it. If you walked into the event already disillusioned with McCain's grasp of international affairs -- as I did -- his performance seemed a slick cover for substantively deficient ideas. But if you entered the evening with an innate respect for McCain's firm grasp on international relations, his effort was jarring: A functional performance by a candidate who had promised far more.
