Two candidates walked on stage Saturday night. One of them walked off looking like the next President of the United States. And it wasn't John McCain.
American voters could not have been given a clearer choice. As this season's first presidential debate clearly demonstrated, John McCain is hot; Barack Obama is cool. John McCain shoots from the hip; Barack Obama speaks from facts and logic. John McCain represents the past; Barack Obama looks to the future.
Even their physical differences were striking. Obama is young, tall, thin, robust, and looked like he'd just come from working out in the gym, which he had. McCain is old, short, pasty, porked up from gobbling too many doughnuts on the campaign trail, and looked like he'd just walked off an airplane, which he had.
Perhaps the biggest difference we saw was that Obama came eager to debate, while McCain was clearly unhappy to be there. He never addressed Obama directly and never called him by his first name. In fact, he never even once looked at Obama.
Long-known for having the biggest ego in Congress (which is saying something!), McCain was obviously pissed at having to share the stage with a senate rookie, and he let everybody know it. Seven or eight times, he testily dismissed Obama's comments with a condescending "Senator Obama just doesn't understand." While, twice, Obama had enough self-confidence to observe: "John McCain's right about that."
On both the economy and foreign policy, Obama more than held his own. He cleverly tied McCain to the Bush policies of deregulation which caused today's Wall Street crisis. He very effectively undercut McCain's strange ranting about $18 billion in earmarks by pointing out that McCain himself proposes $300 billion in corporate tax breaks. And he nailed McCain for supporting the invasion of Iraq and insisting it would be a walk in the park.
McCain didn't make any game-changing mistakes, but he did have his embarrassing moments. Despite several comical attempts, he never did figure out how to pronounce "Ahmadinejad." He got the name of the new president of Pakistan wrong. And he strangely delighted in professing his 35-year friendship with Henry Kissinger, who is responsible for perhaps the worst foreign policy disaster in American history.
McCain, in fact, seemed to see the debate as an opportunity to stroll down memory lane: rattling off names of countries he'd visited and world leaders he'd met, quoting Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. It was all so 20th century. McCain even gloated that Reagan had ended the Cold War with "S.D.I." -- which left anybody under 50 wondering what the hell he was talking about.
In the end, McCain came across as just what he is: a senior senator who's been around forever and been in the Congress so long that he's locked in the past and incapable of taking the country in new direction. And Obama showed us who he is: a new face, a new leader with new energy, an agent of change, and ready and qualified to be president.
Not since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy has there been a starker contrast between the two candidates on stage. Yet, even with his five o'clock shadow, Nixon looked better than McCain.