DEBATE #1

OBAMA AND MCCAIN FACE OFF

Friday's debate was no decisive showdown. But for undecided voters watching, did Obama look too green or McCain too mean?

By Walter Shapiro for SALON


Sept. 27, 2008 | Forty-eight years ago when John Kennedy and Richard Nixon faced off for an hour in a television studio in Chicago, the idea of two presidential nominees meeting on the same stage for a clash of ideas was electrifying. Friday night in Oxford, Miss., when Barack Obama and John McCain stood at dueling lecterns for the first time, both candidates sometimes found it difficult to ignite.

The debate went 97 minutes by the clock, but at times it played longer. For most of the evening, both cautious and well-programmed candidates conducted the debate as if it were the opening salvo of a long war, not a conflict that would be decided by a lightning thrust of a sudden breakthrough. It was almost as if the whole thing was a rehearsal for the two more presidential match-ups to follow, not to mention next Thursday night's land-of-contrasts debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. It is tempting to split the difference and call the imperiled-until-the-last-moment Miracle in Mississippi debate a draw. But what is almost impossible to assess (and, please, do not regard the overnight polls, the focus groups and the instant analysis from the pundit pack as definitive) is how this eagerly anticipated telecast played with undecided or persuadable voters.


For a candidate who claimed that he had spent the prior 48 hours concerned only with the future of the American financial system (and almost did not make the odyssey to Oxford), McCain certainly had a steel-trap memory for attack lines. Especially when the topic turned to foreign policy in the second half of the evening, McCain was like a bantam-weight fighter trying to win a bout on points by peppering Obama with tiny jabs (some of them wildly misleading). Obama -- who could frequently be observed shaking his head and quietly saying, "That is not true" -- tried to be both resolute and reassuring without losing his composure. The back-and-forth details of the debate may have mattered less than the first-term Illinois senator's ability to say with conviction, "That will change when I'm president of the United States."

Obama's weakest moments may have come when he tried too often to be a consensus builder even there onstage wrestling for possession of the Oval Office. "Sen. McCain is absolutely right" seemed to have been Obama's mantra for the evening. McCain, even though he began the evening with a hymn to bipartisanship, did not return the favor. Playing Nixon to Obama's Kennedy, McCain repeatedly tried to portray his rival as untested and unready. As the two men sparred over Obama's belief that rigorous pre-conditions should not deter America from negotiating with nations like Iran and North Korea (an issue that had been a point of contention with Hillary Clinton in the primaries), McCain snapped, "This is dangerous. It isn't just naive; it's dangerous." Stressing Obama's purported inexperience, however, may be a risky tactic for Republicans less than a week before Palin (who governs a state smack-dab between Russia and Canada, thank you) debates Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.


Both Obama and McCain were much crisper when moderator Jim Lehrer toured the world's trouble spots (Iran, Afghanistan, Georgia) in what was originally supposed to be a national-security-only faceoff than during the first half of the debate when the topic switched to the American financial crisis. The difference between the two halves of the debate was an illustration of the virtues of rehearsal (they both had mastered their foreign-policy briefing books) versus the fuzziness of spontaneity (neither candidate ever mentioned Washington Mutual, whose collapse this week was the biggest bank failure in American history).

The 72-year-old McCain did little to gloss over his age, boasting at one point that Henry Kissinger has "been my friend for 35 years," which would date the relationship back to 1973, the year of Obama's 12th birthday. But while McCain never became lost in his prepared remarks (as the then-73-year-old Ronald Reagan did during his first 1984 debate with Walter Mondale), there were a few times when the Republican nominee might have said, "Stop me if you've heard this one before." McCain, for example, twice said that he had not been elected "Miss Congeniality in the United States Senate." More tellingly, though most voters presumably missed it, old national-security-hand McCain stumbled over the pronunciation of a series of names of world leaders, struggling to master Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran) and Asif Ali Zardari (Pakistan).