John McCain spent the week grandstanding, while everyone else in Congress worked to solve the Financial crisis; and then showed up pretending to have solved the problem himself. The reality, of course, is that everyone else in Congress had worked out a solution to the crisis without either McCain or Barack Obama being present.
As a result, the first 40 minutes of the debate Friday night was an exercise in frustration, confusion, and boredom for all parties involved; worst of all, the American people. McCain was rude and disdainful of Obama, dismissive of nearly every phrase that Obama said. Obama wasn't much better, seemingly afraid of causing more carnage in the negotiations that are ongoing. What neither party would talk about, though, was that carnage had already been caused, with McCain screwing everything up just 24 hours earlier.
Obama treated McCain with kid gloves for the first third of the debate, barely making a scratch in McCain's suit of armor...his talking points. Fortunately for Obama, McCain did enough spinning and dancing that by the time Obama did begin to start getting tough, McCain was so worked up and confused about the whole issue that he looked like his head was going to pop off. One would have thought McCain was going to jump out from behind the podium and scream at Obama "Get off my lawn, ya punk!"
Fortunately, at 00:41:00 the game changed, and both men stopped tap dancing, and went to town. McCain continued his angry demeanor, but on his strongest issue, Foreign Policy, he held his own. The surprise, though, was how Obama continued to maintain a Presidential demeanor in the face of repeated hyper-distortion from his opponent. Whereas far-left activists and radio hosts were encouraging (and the right was secretly praying for) Obama to go on the attack, he remained even keel. Even as McCain refused to look at Obama, treated him with no respect at all, and actually insulted Obama in one instance; Obama maintained his composure--even laughing through the insults and "code words" that McCain was using throughout the telecast.
The resulting polling and online commentary has revealed what many reporters and pundits echoed immediately after the debate. Barack Obama had remained essentially "Presidential," and McCain came off as an "angry" old diva. Popular polling aggregation blog FiveThirtyEight.com analyzed the data overnight, and it is clear that Obama played the right cards by not coming off as an angry black man and out-presidentialed the guy who claimed that he was better suited to deal with a dangerous world than Obama was.
From FiveThirtyEight...
"Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was "more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you". This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually speaking to middle class voters. Per the transcript, McCain never once mentioned the phrase "middle class" (Obama did so three times). And Obama's eye contact was directly with the camera, i.e. the voters at home. McCain seemed to be speaking literally to the people in the room in Mississippi, but figuratively to the punditry. It is no surprise that a small majority of pundits seemed to have thought that McCain won, even when the polls indicated otherwise; the pundits were his target audience."
Clearly, Obama continued to follow his strategy of rising above McCain's vitriolic condescension, and McCain continued to grandstand and attack every step of the way. Only time will tell whether Obama did the right thing to win in the end. He sure did no harm to himself; and that might have been the best choice. After all, McCain had his worst week ever. By the time November 4 comes along, if the current trend continues, he'll blow himself out of the water, and Obama will win in a landslide simply by acting the part.