The people have spoken resoundingly, and Barack Obama won the third presidential debate — meaning he has won all of them now. By a 2-to-1 margin or greater in multiple polls, viewers thought Obama bested John McCain. He scored much higher than McCain on both personal attributes (70-22% on likeability, according to CNN) and on the issues (59-35% on the economy, also from CNN). And yet the total and utter disconnect of the punditocracy from voters is astounding. John King of CNN questioned his station’s own poll results on air because he and so many other pundits were convinced that this was McCain’s “strongest performance” to date. Maybe so, but the media norm of faux two-sidedness and trying to keep elections close is getting a little old. I don’t see any other explanation for the fact that Mark Halperin of TIME gave John McCain an A- overall and a B+ on style points.

Speaking of disconnect, what about that Sarah Palin character? The one who said Obama was “palling around with terrorists”? Yeah, her. She claims that she has not been “negative or mean-spirited at all, not whatsoever” in her attacks. That was just about as ridiculous as McCain’s claim last night that his campaign “is about getting this economy back on track, about creating jobs, about a brighter future for America.” He said this one sentence after mentioning the Ayers and ACORN non-scandals. Say what you will about the irrelevance of those non-scandals, it wasn’t even a stylish mention of them.

Tags: 2008 Presidential Election, Ayers, Debates, McCain, Obama, Palin

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