Two bits of commentary on the debate that I think go beyond the run of shallow nonsense most of the cable shows offered last night can be found at Talking Points Memo, where Josh Marshall explains why Barack Obama’s decision to avoid harsh attacks — especially when juxtaposed with John McCain’s attitude — was the correct move, despite criticism from Obama partisans.
James Fallows offers the other (I read Fallows regularly, but it was the TPM post that alerted me to this particular commentary). McCain’s performance, he says, shows the candidate’s stubborn commitment to short-term strategy.
Everything John McCain did on stage last night was consistent with trying to score tactical points in those 90 minutes. He belittled Obama with the repeated “he doesn’t understand”s; he was explicitly insulting to him in saying at the end “I honestly don’t believe that Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience” for the job (a line Joe Biden dare not use so bluntly on Sarah Palin); and implicitly he was shockingly rude and dismissive in refusing ever to look Obama in the eye. Points scored — in the short term, to the cheers of those already on his side.
Obama was steadier, he said, focused more on a longterm approach in the campaign. This should ease concerns among undecideds that he has the right temperment to be the nation’s chief executive.
More imortantly, McCain’s general commitment to the short-term indicates a basic flaw in his character or temperment that could have dire consequences in the White House. Should an emergency present itself, as it will, will he go of half-cocked — as he tends to do, offering ad lib pronouncements without any thought to the impact his words might have? We are all Georgians, he said, which could leave Georgia, Russia, other countries in the region with the impression he would send in the troops. He sings “Bomb Iran” as a joke. He chooses a vice-presidential candidate who he would have known was obviously unqualified had he taken the time to learn more about her. And this is just within the last few years.
My worry is that, despite his long experience and military credentials, he would be likely to inflame international situations and leave us far less safe.
Hank Kalet 
This last week was also when Thom Hartmann’s cognitive dissonance started to fade, and he realized that his screaming for Obama to act like an insult comic was misplaced. This is ‘cognitive dissonance’ because Hartmann often plays his favorite presidential speeches on the air, from FDR, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, in which these people speak intelligently and nothing like an insult comic.But I have known almost all along that Obama is appealing in part because he doesn’t speak like an insult comic. When Obama says he wants to get away from the old politics, he doesn’t mean he wants to be a super-world-saving-liberal or anything like that–he means he wants to be able to have an intelligent conversation.That’s precisely why it was so damaging when Obama lied to his supporters about the contents of the FISA-gutting bill. It was the first time Obama had outright lied to them, making it impossible to have an intelligent conversation about the FISA-gutting bill, because Obama would deny the facts upon which such a conversation must be based.We really have to play our own part in the new politics, if it is to come, by ceasing to revel in puerility. We should scold our candidates if they act like children, rather than if they act like adults.
I forgot to mention that Obama does take shots at people, but they may be so craftily done that people do not notice. For instance, when Obama took a lot of heat for seeming to praise Ronald Reagan, actually he was insulting Bill Clinton, and got the desired result that Bill and Hillary publicly lost their tempers somewhat.Obama’s doing the same kind of stuff to McCain and McCain is nearly boiling over, as a result.