First off, let’s stop thinking about a landslide. The remaining “undecided” voters are mostly older, less educated and white, I understand. It’s like a majority of them will move to McCain and tighten up the race in the last three weeks. No complacency.

Here we go.

Jeez, McCain is being friendly to Obama. The nice and calm McCain showed up tonight.

So far we haven’t heard anything new, except that McCain apparently has decided to be soothing rather than angry.

OK, McCain is back to taxes.

McCain indeed is planning to cut corporate taxes.

Class warfare! Yes! Grumpy McCain is coming back!

Why increase taxes? Because we’ve got a kajillion dollar deficit, you creep.

McCain the asshole is coming back. You can’t keep him down for long.

Does McCain understand what “spread the wealth around” means?

Invest in America. Yes! Obama said “Invest in America.” This should be a campaign slogan.

Wow, the moderator wants McCain to answer the question that was asked. That’s new.

John, we owe China a lot more than half a trillion dollars.

He can save billions by eliminating the tarrif on sugar from Brazil? I think I missed part of that.

Earmarks! Pork! boogaboogaboogabooga

Balance the budget in four years? That’s insane.

We’re going to balance the budget by job creation and energy independence?

I mean, is it me, or is McCain an asshole?

Here we go … say it to his face.

Town hall meetings? The negative campaigns are Obama’s fault for not doing town hall meetings?

Whine whine whine. Oh, McCain has not repudiated nasty remarks. He repeats them.

He’s not bringing up Ayers. Coward.

Yes. The American people are not interested in our hurt feelings. Perfect.

Comment about Chico and the Man — LOL! Chico and the Man in the Twilight Zone.

Yes, John, keep whining.

John is angry.

Oh, Obama brought up the “pal around with terrorists” line.

McCain didn’t take the Ayers bait.

Oh, yes, Ayers, ACORN, the whole thing. I think McCain is giving in to his temper. I wonder if this was the plan.

McCain is losing this debate worse than the other two. People don’t give a bleep about Ayers and ACORN.

I forgot about CNN’s squiggly lines. I just flipped to CNN.

At the name “Sarah Palin” the squiggly lines dropped like a rock. Flatline, folks. Oh, the “men” line is up just a tad. Well, men. You know.

Iraqis united? People are being killed for returning to their homes.

I swear, McCain is losing this one worse than the other two.

Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Very safe.

Easily eliminate dependence on foreign oil?

Obama is being realistic. Talking to the camera.

Does John think NAFTA is popular?

Community colleges have what to do with free trade?

I think McCain is right on the edge of blowing a gasket.

Oh, I love the split screen. McCain’s inner asshole is there for all the world to see.

Here Obama is presenting a clear and sensible plan for health care, even though it doesn’t go nearly as far as I’d like. Now McCain will lie about his plan.

Yeah, John, blame it on fat people.

He’s going to repeat the lie about fining small business again.

I mean, is McCain is an asshole or what? He’s not even making sense. The fine again.

That mean old Obama is going to make employers provide health benefits. For shame.

Oh, the gold-plated insurance that no one has. Yes, John, show us how out of touch with reality you are.

Senator Obama wants government to do a job. Well, yes.

Roe v. Wade. Somebody finally brings it up.

“Strict adherence to Constitution” = anti-choice.

“We have to change the culture of America.”

The “present” vote is a procedural thing in the Illinois Senate. It sounds weird but is no big deal, I understand.

Keep smirking and smiling, John.

We can’t have healthy mothers. “Health of the mother” is an extreme position, according to John.

“We have to work together” for John means abortion gets banned.

Make college affordable. It is a disgrace that there is such a barrier for people to get an education.

McCain begins to speak, the squiggly lines drop. “School choice” has not been “proven” in New Orleans, John.

“Competition” doesn’t help schools, John. Now he’s repeating the old right-wing canard that some of the best schools cost the least money. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Vouchers = yesterday’s issue. Even the wingnuts are abandoning it.

Sarah Palin has an autistic child?

Vouchers have not been proven. Where they’ve been in place a long time they haven’t done squat.

Almost over.

John, I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you.

Invest in the American people. I like it.

Sacrifice, service responsibility. We can do it. Work for you.

_______

I sincerely think McCain sucked at least as bad, if not worse, than he has in the other two debates.

David Gergen is saying that McCain got over-emotional and angry in the middle of the debate. Obama won the last half hour, he said.

I agree with Gergen. I think that when McCain would not let go of his personal hurt feelings about being insulted, he was losing big time.

I’m going to guess that this debate won’t change the trajectory of the opinion polls. I think the polls will tighten up at the end for reasons explained at the top of the post, but this debate won’t change the polls.

Just picked this up at Huffington Post:

Watch the eye roll.

I also am not sure the “I am not George Bush” line will help McCain much. Right now his biggest problem is that he is John McCain.

Why is John McCain wasting time campaigning in Iowa? And why in eastern Iowa, which is next to Illinois, which you know is in the tank for Obama? John Deeth writes for the Iowa Independent:

So, with pundits rapidly moving Iowa into the Safe Democratic column, why is McCain making his third visit to the state? The pollsters “aren’t talking to true Iowans,” said Janice Levsen of Muscatine. “He needs to show us he cares about us, because we care about him.”

So what makes an Iowan a “true” Iowan? As opposed to someone who was born and lives in Iowa but is not, you know, “true”? Is there a secret True Iowan Society?

And then there’s the matter of what’s real.

Mark Gardner of Colona, Ill. says Republicans are frustrated. “People want him to go after the real Obama.” Is the campaign getting too personal? “Only if you’re a Democrat,” says a friend of Gardner’s, who moves ahead in line before I get his name.

OK, but is Mr. Gardner a true Illini? Just askin’.

Questions are flying — who is the real Barack Obama? Who is the real Sarah Palin? Who is the real John McCain? One wonders if the candidates might shed their skins and turn into that giant bug thing from Men in Black.

The McCain campaign wants you to believe the “real” Barack Obama is a Muslim planning to put the U.S. under Shariah law. Uh, sure. You try to make Michelle Obama wear a burqa. I dare you.

Real Americans wonder why so many of us don’t see that Barack Obama is a wild-eyed radical. Well, I don’t see it because I’m in the tank for Obama. This means little nano-thingies crawled into my ear when I was sleeping and implanted an Obama microchip in my brain. Hillary Clinton tried to warn us, but it was too late for me.

Real Americans know that the real Barack Obama was programmed as a small child to enable the Soviet takeover of America. Too bad the Soviet Union collapsed before Obama was old enough to run for President and carry out the plan. Or maybe the real Soviet Union is alive and well and hiding under the ice in Siberia, ready to sweep across the Bering Strait and into Alaska as soon as it gets the radio signal?

At the same time, Sarah Palin has been lured out of Alaska, where she might have been watching Russia from her house. John McCain chose her to be veep. Is McCain in on the conspiracy, too?

It’s all starting to fit. But why is McCain in Iowa? Hmmm.

Update: More real true stuff — documented proof that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and even if he was born in Hawaii and not Kenya, he lost his natural-born citizenship status because his stepfather moved to Indonesia and … OK, I can’t follow it after that. But it’s truthy as hell.

BTW, is the video producer pulling our leg with this?

I think McCain was at his worst last night when he used lines that are sure-fire winners when thrown at a right-wing audience but which leave the rest of us cold or confused.

For example, on the Right, General Petraeus is the second coming of Robert E. Lee. To the Left, he’s a tool. To Independents, he’s some military guy they may vaguely associate with the Bush Administration, or not. To the Right, everything Petraeus says is gospel. To the Left, it’s suspect. I believe that to most Independents it’s white noise — just more of the endless bullshit about the endless war, and who knows what to believe any more?

McCain says Petraeus as if he expect the audience to genuflect at the sound of the General’s name. Memo: They ain’t genuflecting.

Also, if you were watching CNN, whenever McCain deployed the words Iraq, Petraeus, surge, victory and success together in near proximity, you saw the squiggly lines go flat. I don’t think most people bleeping care about the bleeping surge or a bleeping victory in Iraq. Iraq itself represents the Ultimate Bleepup to most people, and nothing associated with it can ever be made shiny.

And how long will it take the Right to notice that “fourth generation” wars don’t end in victory? At best, they sort of taper off into reasonably favorable conditions. Victory is obsolete. And I think many people who are not right-wing ideologues understand this on some level, even if they cannot always articulate why it is so.

The United States stayed in Vietnam way too long because our political and military leaders continued to pursue the mythical beast of victory. Some of McCain’s talk about bringing troops home with “victory and honor” could have been picked up verbatim from 1971 or so. It was dumb then; it’s insane now.

I also think McCain comes across as a dolt whenever he continues to harp on some right-wing talking point that Obama, clearly and calmly, has just demolished. For example, in both debates McCain continued to claim that Obama will raise just about everybody’s taxes, even after Obama stated and re-stated his actual tax proposals. This is an especially poor tactic (but not a strategy, Senator McCain) when the opponent standing next to you is such a likable guy. Here’s this nice fella, and that nasty McCain’s calling him a liar.

As I remember, when McCain said “Well, you know, nailing down Sen. Obama’s various tax proposals is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. There has been five or six of them and if you wait long enough, there will probably be another one,” the squiggly lines dropped. I bet that brings down the house at McCain rallies, but in front of a non-partisan audience a line like that is just pettiness.

Memo: Ronald Reagan is still dead. And, as more than one blogger has written today, “I knew Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was a friend of mine, and you, Senator McCain, are no Teddy Roosevelt.”

You get a glimpse of McCain’s real problem in this post by The Weekly Standard‘s Fred Barnes:

The candidates were queried on a narrow range of foreign, economic, health care, and environmental issues–the stuff they talk about every day at rallies and fundraisers. These didn’t come close to what voters at a real town hall meeting might have asked. There was no mention of abortion, immigration, moral values, same sex marriage, guns, their role models, their view of the presidency, or their religious faith.

In other words, the questions didn’t come close to what right-wing ideologues hand-picked to fill up McCain town hall meetings might have asked. Instead, it was boring stuff about foreign, economic, health care, and environmental issues.

Barnes is right that the candidates — well, Obama anyway — address these topics in their stump speeches. However, most of the nation has not heard the stump speeches. For most voters, the debates provide the only view of the candidates outside of commercials and brief news clips they are going to get. That’s really sad, and we need to change that, but that’s how it is.

Barnes continues,

Rather than an unrehearsed town hall meeting, the Commission on Presidential Debates let NBC anchor Tom Brokaw to select the questions. The result was questions that reflected what interests an East Coast newsman. Nothing wrong with that, except this was supposed to be a town hall debate in which the concerns of average folks would be front and center. They weren’t.

Barnes might think it’s elitist of me to say this, but I don’t think Barnes would recognize the concerns of average folks if they bit his ass. In fact, polls say their priorities of concerns are pretty much inverse of what Barnes thinks they are.

Last night and this morning some on the Right lambasted McCain for not bringing up Bill Ayers or Reverent Wright or the host of other red herrings the Moosewoman has been throwing lately. But he did not, and this shows us that at least some of McCain’s handlers make occasional visits to the real world.

The base can’t get enough of Ayers and Wright. The base is more interested in Obama’s alleged Muslim-terrorist ties than in the financial crisis. The base is out of its bleeping mind. But to Americans who are not lunatics, the sleazy allegations and hate speech the McCain campaign uses to fire up the base would have been shockingly out of place in last night’s debate. Think nude poll pole dancing at a church supper. It would have damaged McCain a lot more than Obama.

Put another way — the Right’s fantasy narratives and agenda cannot survive outside the Right’s fantasy world. Forced into a real-world context, they dissipate like smoke.

Whew! I fell asleep and just woke up in time. Here we go.

First question about economy. Fastest solution to bail out retirees?

McCain wants to buy and renegotiate all bad home loans. He’s going to pay for this?

I think Obama is going to have to be careful not to get sucked into spending all his time defending his past record from McCain’s, um, imagination.

McCain has figured out that the financial crisis has something to do with bad mortgages. Swift.

Now he is going on about how great American workers are. So get them jobs, John.

McCain a “consistent reformer”? Please. Does anyone believe that?

I’ve just switched to CNN to watch the wiggly lines. McCain is speaking. The line is flat.

Will McCain please be asked to explain his health care “plan.”

Obama is speaking, and Miss Lucy (my feline roommate) just went crazy running around the room. I think she is an Obama fan.

Someone asked which sacrifices citizens can make for their country, and McCain goes on about earmarks and cutting government programs.

Obama speaks up about a call to service. The American people want to engage in meaningful change. Save energy in your home. Fuel-efficient cars. Peace corps.

Revealing, I think, that McCain only thinks in terms of what Washington does, not what Americans can do.

McCain comes on and says Obama is going to raise taxes.

He wants a commission on Medicare. To do what? He’s not making sense.

Climate change — McCain says the best way to fix it is nuclear power? That’s it?

Obama — calls climate change an opportunity; new technology can help grow economy. Government working with private sector.

I never know how these guys are coming across to undecided voters.

Obama brings up McCain’s health care “plan.” I think most people understand that $5000 for a family can’t buy health insurance. Ooo, he brought up “gold plated” health care.

Obama – we need the money we’re spending in Iraq here in the U.S. This needs to be repeated, repeated, repeated.

McCain is going on about Iraq and Petraeus and the line goes flat.

Now McCain isn’t making sense. Obama didn’t say he would attack Pakistan. We’re going to succeed in Pakistan the way we succeeded in Iraq. I’m not sure he understands that most people don’t consider Iraq a “success.”

He keeps saying Obama is going to attack Pakistan, which he clearly didn’t do.

Once again, McCain talks about General Petraeus. General Petraeus is beloved on the Right but I don’t think the majority of the American people feel anything about him one way or another. Throwing the name “Petraeus” around just doesn’t sing for most people.

The BooMan: “McCain sucks harder than a vacuum.”

McCain’s “league of democracies” idea is just surreal.

Passing on the American Dream to the next generation. Good closing statement. Not exactly answering the question, but good closing statement.

McCain is talking about a “steady hand at the tiller.” That would be Obama.

OK, it’s over. Now we’ll hear the bobbleheads talk about how McCain was so much better this time and probably won the debate.

Rachel Maddow: McCain was swinging and missing. Obama seemed more relaxed than McCain.

Pat Buchanan thinks McCain won the debate. Big surprise.

Update: The CNN quickie poll is coming through — Obama won.

As I keyboard the NYSE hasn’t opened yet this morning, but word is that stocks are dropping hard in Europe and Asia. Little Lulu is whining — Wasn’t the bailout supposed to calm the financial markets? The magnitude of what’s happening in Economyland hasn’t sunk into her overheated little head.

The wingnuts are pushing the usual nonsense and trivia they use to derail elections. Little Green Footballs (to which I would rather not link) displays a photo of Bill Ayers standing on a flag that was taken in 2001, at a time that Barack Obama and Ayers were both serving on the board of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic organization in Chicago. This is the Right’s idea of a Serious Issue. (BTW, the photo, which was used with a feature on Ayers in the August 2001 issue of Chicago magazine, no doubt was a pose the magazine requested. That’s how these things usually work.)

For the remaining month of the campaign the names Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko and Rev. Wright will be chanted fervently on television and radio. They will slide into our email boxes and consume vast amounts of ink on newspaper op ed pages.

Oh, and taxes! liberal! boogaboogaboogabooga!!!!!

Even now top-level Republican strategists are meeting to discuss why Sarah Palin’s winks and “you betchas” are not moving the polls for McCain. It’ll be fun to see what they try next. Will they tone Palin down or ramp her up into an even more garish cartoon than she already is? Will Joe Lieberman be videoed crying real tears?

Michael Tomasky writes at The Guardian,

Pssst. Don’t spread it around too much, because there’s still a month to go and I don’t want to jinx things – but substance is in this year. …

… We are a country in decline. The decline is the result of the policies of the last eight years. Everyone outside of hardcore conservatives knows this. No candidate for president can utter the sentence “we are a country in decline”. America’s central myth about itself is that, unlike Rome or Austria-Hungary or (sorry) an earlier Britain, we are impervious to time’s vicissitudes and will always be numero uno. People now are worried that underneath that bravado, maybe we won’t be.

And so, substance matters. The public responses to the financial meltdown and the first two debates make this evident.

Howard Wolfson:

Why won’t the swiftboat tactics work this year?

Its easy to lose sight of it in the day to day coverage, but the collapse of Wall Street in the last weeks was a seminal event in the history of our nation and our politics. To put the crisis in perspective, Americans have lost a combined 1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks alone. Just as President Bush’s failures in Iraq undermined his party’s historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets.

Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the proper role of government for a century. In 1980 voters sided with Ronald Reagan and Republicans that government had become too big and intrusive. Then the economy worked in the Republicans’ favor. Today the pendulum has swung in our direction. Republican philosophies have been discredited by events. Voters understand this. This is a big election about big issues. McCain’s smallball will not work. This race will not be decided by lipsticked pigs. And John McCain can not escape that reality. The only unknowns are the size of the margin and the breadth of the Democratic advantage in the next Congress.

A lot can happen in a month, so it’s no time to get complacent. The election still will be closer than it ought to be because of racism. But over the next four weeks expect the Right to spin faster and further into utter irrelevance. They are starting to sound like a steward on the Titanic, shouting that if people don’t stop this nonsense about rowing out to sea in lifeboats they’ll miss out on dinner with the Captain.

See also — Roger Cohen has a genuinely awesome column today.

So I get to live blog, I suppose to give my perspective as both a Young Person and as a debate expert. (I have 12-some years of experience with policy debate, as a participant, judge, and coach, most recently affiliated with the University of Massachusetts. See, once upon a time, people payed me to judge debate. I’m like Gwen Ifill. Only, you know, pastier.)

Last Friday, I watched the debate from the comfort of one of my favorite bars, and tonight, I’m at a small gathering of friends at an apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn for extra Young People Cred. We’re eating fondue and drinking lambic (a Belgian beer brewed with fruit). My friend who’s hosting (Olga) just informed all assembled that there is plenty of alcohol, so this could get entertaining.

The pundits are all basically that if Sarah Palin doesn’t fall on her face, it’ll be a success. So, let’s get to it. Get out your bingo cards.
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