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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Watch this space!

Oh, that’s cute. Can I call you Joe? Nice.

Palin is looking at the camera and Biden did not.

OK, we’ve got the canned remarks out of the way.

She’s pointing at predator lenders and corruption. Personal responsibility.

Joe is getting in the quote about deregulating health care.

Palin: Taxes taxes taxes booga booga booga

As mayor she left her city in crippling debt. Someone should bring that up.

Biden is repeating the middle class tax cut. There you go Joe, look at the camera.

Palin: Redistribution of wealth. I hate that term.

Government is the problem.

Crossing state lines to buy insurance; I still don’t believe that’s possible.

Biden — ultimate bridge to nowhere. Good line.

Energy plan — Palin had to take on the oil companies. She broke up a monopoly?

Ooo, the bankruptcy bill. Greed and corruption don’t have anything to do with the bankruptcy bill. But Biden wasn’t on the side of the angels with that one.

We don’t have enough fossil fuel resources to eliminate dependence on foreign oil.

Don’t care as much about the climate than we do? Foreign countries will laugh.

OK, guys, how do you think it’s going so far?

Same sex versus heterosexual couples, no discrimination, says Biden. Hospital visitations, life insurance, benefits. Property.

Ooo, she just glows when she talks about the surge.

Funding the troops.

Ooo, white flag of surrender! Here we go!

I think she’s losing it. She’s repeating her talking points and not responding to what Biden said.

Al Qaeda is defining our war.

At least she can pronounce the name of whozits of Iran.

We’re in favor of diplomacy but not with people we don’t like.

McCain has pain and won’t sit down in Spain.

I honestly don’t know how this might be going over.

Here you go, Joe! No different from George Bush’s.

Um, little girl, Kim Jung Il already has nuclear weapons.

Ooo, we’re building schools in Afghanistan. Sure.

Bosnia. Kosovo. Bosnia.

She still sees like a ditz to me, but how will an independent voter see this?

The SNL writers are taking notes.

Pointing backward.

I just flipped to CNN to see the focus group line. The gang at MyDd says the squiggly lines like Biden.

Ooh, they’re right. As soon as Joe talks the lines swing up. Women like him especially.

She’s not answering the achilles’ heel question.

Palin speaks, the squiggly lines are nearly flat. This is fun.

Joe almost choked up.

Maverick maverick maverick. Oh, and the lines just went flat. Wheee!

Joe is challenging the “maverick” thing. The squiggly lines go up.

She appoints people of all parties in Alaska, as long as they are her friends.

OK, what did you think?

Y’all go ahead and talk among yourselves.

So I get up this morning and make the coffee and surf around to get reactions to last night’s debate.

The first reactions from pundits and bloggers last night was that [fill in name of preferred candidate] won on points, but [the other guy] held his own, and neither emerged a clear winner. Dana Milbank and other professional commenters complained that the debate was “tepid” and boring. Politics is just entertainment, after all.

However, there is evidence the television audience saw a different debate. Polls by CBS and CNN say that independents watching the debate came away more impressed by Obama. The Frank Luntz and Stanley Greenberg focus groups went overwhelmingly for Obama.

Why the difference?

One, I think most of the television audience was getting an unfiltered look at these guys for the first time, Obama in particular. And the meme Obama’s opponents have spread is that Obama is an empty suit, unsubstantial, a good orator but otherwise clueless. But the Obama who debated last night clearly was intelligent and knowledgeable as well as articulate. He may have pleasantly surprised people who haven’t been paying close attention to the campaigns until now.

Peter S. Canellos, Boston Globe:

McCain tried repeatedly to portray Obama as a neophyte, prefacing many answers with variants of the statement, “What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand,” and later insisting that Obama “showed a little bit of naiveté.”

But Obama didn’t seem either uncomprehending or naive, and McCain seemed so frustrated at times that he almost lost his cool.

After Obama followed a McCain jab about Obama’s failure to hold a hearing of his Senate subcommittee with a return punch that McCain had once claimed the United States could “muddle through” in Afghanistan, the Arizona senator clenched his teeth, flared his eyes, and seemed on the verge of losing composure.

Finally, he came out and said what he couldn’t demonstrate.

“I honestly don’t believe that Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience and has made the wrong judgments in a number of areas,” McCain insisted.

But the claim wasn’t backed up by what viewers had seen for the past hour.

John Dickerson:

McCain repeatedly asserted that on foreign-policy issues Obama “didn’t understand.” But Obama didn’t look like a man who didn’t understand. McCain was essentially calling Obama a Sarah Palin—but Obama didn’t look like one.

Second, I think way too much of McCain’s arguments for himself were grounded many years in the past, which to me made him seem stuck there. One of the focus group people in the video above said McCain was “sentimental,” and a young woman said she wanted to hear more from McCain about what’s going on right now.

Third is the “gumpy old man” factor. Richard Adams:

McCain refused to look in Obama’s direction – even as he was delivering his own attacks against the Democratic candidate, and so allowed his body language to undercut his spoken language, suggesting that he was uncomfortable or even embarrassed.

And that seemingly minor detail seems likely to have hurt McCain. CNN’s coverage of the debate carried an interesting feature: a real-time reaction graph from a focus group running along the bottom of the screen. Most of the time the graph was flat-lining – when McCain spoke the Republican audience members generally gave him higher marks and the Democrats gave him lower ones, with independent voters in the middle. But when McCain stridently attacked Obama his approval lines turned down, sometimes very sharply. So while grizzled journalists may have liked McCain’s fighting talk, it turned off the independent voters watching. Similarly, McCain’s aggression isn’t likely to have played well with female voters but better with male voters (according to the stereotype).

And, according to CNN, male viewers were evenly split on who won, but women overwhelmingly preferred Obama. I think women are less inclined than men to associated a hot temper with leadership ability.

Joan Walsh:

I wish I’d organized a drinking game around the number of times John McCain said, “Sen. Obama doesn’t understand,” or found some other way to sneer at Obama as naive and inexperienced. For the most part he refused to even look at Barack Obama over 90 minutes. What an ass. It was hackneyed and condescending and, to me, repellent. But did it work? …

…I think Obama more than held his own in this first debate, but if you’re looking for a grumpy, sarcastic put-down artist as president, your choice is quite clear.

Eugene Robinson:

Throughout the 90-minute debate, McCain seemed contemptuous of Obama. He wouldn’t look at him. He tried to belittle him whenever possible — how many times did he work “Senator Obama just doesn’t understand” into his answers? His body language was closed, defensive, tense. McCain certainly succeeded in proving that he can be aggressive, but the aggression came with a smirk and a sneer.

Fourth, several commenters said that after McCain’s erratic behavior for the past couple of weeks, he needed a big win tonight to “change the game” (and can I say I’m really growing tired of that phrase?). A tie might have been good enough for Obama, but not for McCain.

Fifth, as Nate at Five Thirty-Eight points out, Obama looked at the television camera and spoke to the televison audience; McCain did not.

Obama’s eye contact was directly with the camera, i.e. the voters at home. McCain seemed to be speaking literally to the people in the room in Mississippi, but figuratively to the punditry. It is no surprise that a small majority of pundits seemed to have thought that McCain won, even when the polls indicated otherwise; the pundits were his target audience.

Further, Nate says Obama is opening up a gap in “connectedness.” By a big margin, viewers thought Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you.” This was supposed to be Obama’s big weakness — he couldn’t connect with those “ordinary” folks.

Last night, the pundits all criticized Obama for allowing McCain to hijack the first half hour or so of the debate by talking about earmarks and taxes. Nate disagrees, saying that earmarks are not an issue voters care much about right now. I don’t know how much people understand that earmarks, however egregious, did not cause the Wall Street financial crisis. However, I do think McCain might have come across as an ass by continuing to talk about Obama raising taxes even as Obama was standing there saying no, I’m going to raise taxes only on the wealthy, and close loopholes so corporations pay their fair share.

Finally — last night several of you expressed frustration that Obama wasn’t punching McCain hard enough. Given the way the post-debate memes are shaping up, I’m beginning to think Obama’s “gentlemanly” strategy may have been smart.

See also: Mark Halperin gives Obama the better grade.