The Presidential Debate

This was Obama's night. He hit all the right notes and he connected with a message that went right to the heart of American voters struggling to hear a strong, reassuring voice in the worst period of wealth destruction in history since the Great Depression. Obama was comfortable and confident and delivered a clear message that also came across as sincere and heartfelt.

I expected McCain to excel in the townhall format of the debate; but he didn't connect with me tonight. He spent too much time attacking Obama and for the most part, the attack simply wasn't effective and didn't have the right timing. He attacked when he shouldn't have and didn't when he should have.

McCain has a lot of things going against him. He is up against an adversarial media that is increasingly indistinguishable from the Obama campaign and he is way down in the polls. The media has been an effective PR arm of the Obama campaign in spreading and explaining Obama's policies. Tonight was a critical opportunity for McCain to sell what the media won't sell for him; but tonight he failed to sell his policies himself. He spent too much time repeating platitude after platitude and so little time getting down to the details. And even here, McCain is simply not as good as Obama. Obama delivered his platitudes with an earthiness and warmth that I would have thought McCain would have more of. Instead, McCain delivered his prepared lines with a mechanical precision and robotic coldness, and with a repetitiveness that announced each time during his talk that he was entering "prepared-lines territory".

Tonight was a moment for reaching out to uncommited voters. Card-carrying Democrats and Republicans have already committed to their presidential candidate long before they knew who that would be. McCain needed to make his case to uncommitted independents. But tonight, Obama made the better sales pitch. He learned from the last debate and came prepared this time with the rebuttals he should have brought at the first debate; and he introduced new attacks that added to his growing ammunition against McCain.

Tonight is a big disappointment for team McCain. I can't see why Obama's lead shouldn't grow after tonight's victory. The Republicans need to do a better job of selling their agenda. Selling them to the voters would be much easier than selling them to Democrats. If they can't even carry out an effective sales pitch to independents, they'll never going to win over Democrats and an unfriendly media.