who wins?

We couldn't celebrate Sean's birthday since he wasn't able to make it home, but my brother David came over, and the parents came back from their renovation-related errand with a few hefty bags of Popeye's chicken, rice, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and those nasty-good apple pies.

We watched John McCain's last attempt at sounding presidential during a debate, and while I've been pleased with both candidates, who in the end aren't as dirty or as noble as they're made out to be, I thought Obama came off as the one who more clearly and simply expressed his ideas. McCain struck me as having almost Bush-like moments of inarticulateness, and while I'm sure McCain has more ideas (and brain cells) than the current president, he didn't lay those ideas out very well. In fact, he sounded almost Palin-like with his occasionally pretzled grammar and his tendency to force discussion back to a very limited set of talking points, many of which seemed to come down to punchlines like "he's [Obama's] gonna spread the wealth around" or "he's gonna raise taxes on you."

There were moments in the debate where I was reminded of the famous exchange between Ross Perot and Al Gore, when Gore calmly pointed out a major inconsistency between Perot's previous business dealings and his current rhetoric about NAFTA. Perot was caught completely off guard, a fact that became apparent to us all when those famous ears of his went beet-red. And that was pretty much the end of Ross Perot, whose own temper was a major factor in his self-destruction.

But despite the resemblance between Obama's sang froid and Gore's bland calm, McCain didn't go over the edge tonight. He, like Sarah Palin, tended to blink too much, and he was visibly agitated at moments, but all in all, he remained relatively calm under fire, and retained enough poise to be, in fact, the more aggressive of the two, at least in terms of tone.

Neither candidate struck me as particularly revolutionary on issues like education and health care, which made me worry that we were in for another boring debate (good God, all those "Joe the Plumber" references!), but I was intrigued by moderator Bob Schieffer's inclusion of a question regarding the civility of the respective campaigns. This segment was the tensest of the whole debate, with neither candidate apologizing for what has been said and done in the drive to win.

But as this part of the debate dragged on, it dawned on me that Schieffer had initially said that the final debate was supposed to be devoted to domestic policy. Once I'd latched on to that thought, the entire segment began to seem annoyingly irrelevant, especially given the pressing issues that should have gotten more air time.

So in the end, I came away feeling that Obama had scored more points in terms of tone, content, and the ability to lay out his arguments in a clear and logical manner. The famously temperamental Nicolas Sarkozy, during a debate with socialist rival Ségolène Royal, chided his interlocutor for showing anger; a president should have a calm demeanor, he told her. Obama's got that down pat. I don't think he came off as arrogant or aloof at all; he was, on the debating floor, a steadier rifleman than John McCain, and at this point I fully expect him to win the election.


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