CBS poll of 500 uncommitted voters: 40% said Obama won, 26% said McCain, 34% thought it was a draw.

After the debate, 68 percent of uncommitted voters said that they think Obama will make the right decisions on the economy, compared to 55 percent who said that before the debate. Fewer thought McCain would do so – 48 percent after the debate, and 41 percent before.

Before the debate, 59 percent thought Obama understands voters’ needs and problems; that rose to 80 percent after the debate. For McCain, 33 percent felt he understands voters’ needs before the debate, and 44 percent thought so afterwards.

There is some good news for McCain, who still dominates Obama when it comes to perceptions of readiness to be president. Before the debate, 42 percent thought Obama was prepared for the job, and that percentage rose to 58 percent after the debate. But 77 percent felt McCain was prepared for the job before the debate, and 83 percent thought so afterwards.

A CNN debate poll found 54% said Obama did the best job, 30% said McCain did. "By a greater than two to one margin — 65 percent to 28 percent — viewers thought Obama was more likeable during the debate. ... A majority of debate watchers polled thought Obama was more intelligent, by a 57 percent to 25 percent margin over McCain. Twice as many debate watchers also thought Obama more clearly expressed than McCain, with 60 percent giving the nod to the Democratic nominee and 30 percent to his GOP opponent. Hands down, debate watchers questioned thought McCain rather than Obama spent more time attacking his opponent: 63 percent said McCain went more negative, as opposed to 17 percent who pointed to Obama. ... McCain did come out on top in one category that neither candidate wants to win: By a 16 point margin, debate watchers thought McCain seemed more like a typical politician during the debate. ... The poll suggests that independent voters thought Obama won the debate. Fifty-four percent of those identifying themselves as independent say Obama performed best, with 28 percent saying that McCain did the better job."

I agree with David Brooks' take on PBS tonight, that Obama seemed more confident, more at home in the times than McCain. A datedness to McCain came through in the forum tonight, especially in the first part of the debate, a datedness to his ideas about the economy, especially. And like one has sometimes with like a great uncle or something, a lack of awareness of how dated and out of touch some of the talking points sound. Does Ronald Reagan still offer the answer to today's economy? To listen to McCain, it did. But it sounded really thirty years old to my ears, and like he hadn't given the issues much thought, although he seemingly sort of tacked on a couple current received ideas wholesale into his remarks without explaining them in a way that at least I could grasp what he was talking about (buying the country's bad mortgage debt, spending freeze, but how do you have them both together??). He is more passionate about his national security posture, he owns it more as an issue, whether or not one agrees with it. But by the time that part of the debate came up, at least I already had a sense that beyond the current battle of this debate, he had missed his moment, and his ideas and thinking seemed stuck in the past (when he referenced Republicans and Democrats working together like they did in 1983, for instance, a quarter century ago, just as one example; he also repeatedly invoked Lebanon -- in 1982! The effect is that these formative events for him he is discussing with the intent to relate to a currrent issue happened in a distant, different world, and he's not even aware how many decades have passed.) On the other hand, McCain did seem perhaps less cranky, seemed to make an effort at points to tolerate Obama except when he couldn't (the startling "that one"), and connected with some of the audience questions well. It wasn't a blow out, but overall I felt the momentum stay well on Obama's side, and while he won according to CBS instapoll, still only 15% of the audience of 500 uncommitted voters moved to Obama, and 12% to McCain by the end of the night, the rest remained uncommitted.

Meantime, to read the right-wing sites tonight, they seem to have really convinced themselves that Obama is the anti-Christ, and McCain was foolish not to expose him. Have they managed to really convince themselves of this? Or are they afraid of losing power? the access to power they and their circles have had all these years? The mind reels. What does the right want? They've had almost total power for much of the past eight years. What do they want? How can they blame others for their failures? Bush wasn't conservative enough, they complain. Neither was his father. McCain isn't a true conservative. Palin is a true conservative but has other deficiencies. Is there a utopian ideal for the perfect conservative who would institute their plans the way they envision them in some perfect world? Their explanations and excuses for how it didn't go the way they thought it would when they controlled the executive and the legislature and much of the courts make the mind reel. And so they blame of course Obama, Pelosi, liberals, Soros, immigrants, the New York Times, whatever handy target real or manufactured is around. Whatever happened to the idea of being mugged by reality? You can see David Frum and David Brooks even Krauthammer and George Will have cautiously accepted some version of reality, but others are resisting regime change with all their might, and while they have convinced themselves it's for the deepest ideological/security convictions, one suspects for some it is also because as with other regime change scenarios, they fear it would cost them so dearly.

Update: More from Kevin Drum, Addie Stan, and Balagan: "When politics fails these believers, they cannot examine themselves and their position in any contingent way, but must blame the false conservatives, the conniving media, the infested immigrants, the Gigantic Left-wing Conspiracy that so inconveniently votes from time to time in the majority, and all the rest of the the stabs-in-the-back."

Posted by Laura at October 7, 2008 11:05 PM