Hank Kalet

Hall Institute of Public Policy is hosting an online forum on the debate, To participate click here.

The MSNBC crew is giving the debate to McCain as if what is most important is the winner.

I’m not sure I agree with their review — McCain was snarky and odd and sometimes rambling. I don’t see that McCain won on the economy — he had difficulty talking about economic concepts and could only go to tax cuts. I agree that Obama didn’t go deep enough into what matters on the economy, but McCain kept pushing the market as the solution.

Here is Chris Bowers on it:

Obama dominated McCain during the economic section (the first forty minutes), and kept delivering great lines the entire night: you voted for bush’s budgets, you sing songs about bombing Iran, you didn’t know Span was an ally, you think the war started in 2007, McCain says the fundamentals of the economy are strong, etc. He rarely ventured into defensive territory, as he is known to do at some times,

McCain got stronger as the night went on, but really only had two good soundbites: “Obama doesn’t understand tactics vs. strategy” and a short skit about talking with Iran. He was a bit more fluid than Obama during the second forty minutes, but it is hard for me to believe that talking about cutting wasteful spending will reassure people during the economic crisis. He made numerous mis-statements of facts–for example, he made 50 votes against clean energy while claiming he had none–but still came off reasonably well. I don’t think he hurt himself.

CNN seems to agree with me and with Bowers; MSNBC seems to be caught up in the peripherals.

Now we’ll get the flash response from the punditry, though I want some time to digest. A general first impression, however, is that both equited themselves well enough.

Did McCain just try to compare Obama to Bush? Is he kidding?

My friend Jim Lukach (do I sound like McCain, my friends?) points out that McCain has yet to look at Obama — and the press has noticed, or at least James Fallows has.

Unless it happened when I glanced away, up until this moment, 77 minutes into the 90-minute debate, John McCain has not once looked at Obama — while listening to him, while addressing him, while disagreeing with him, while finding moments of accord.

This is distinctly strange — if anyone else notices. Obama is acting as if this is a conversation; McCain, as if he cannot acknowledge the other party in the discussion.