It's one of the oddities of modern campaigning that how good you do on any given night doesn't really matter. It's whether there was a soundbite that night that the media, or your opponent, or the voters, will remember down the road. At the Saddleback Forum last weekend, there was a lot of talk about how McCain won, and a lot of liberals wringing their hands over why Obama went in the first place. A week or so later, McCain's comment that a person is rich if they make $5 million a year is being repeated constantly, and is a crucial element in the unfolding narrative against him. So McCain won the night in Saddleback, but it's fairly clear he'd have been better off calling in sick that day and hanging out at one of his eight homes. Weird.
