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.

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