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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I really hate sounding hyperbolic in these posts, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that McCain’s chances at the White House rested on the outcome of this debate. After conceding the foreign policy debate to Obama (widely considered his strength), everybody looked to the town hall format as one more chance for McCain to uplift his sagging poll numbers. After all, he’s good at town hall forums, right?

Not so much. Yet again, millions of Americans witnessed a compassionate, collected Obama juxtaposed with the same vindictive, backbiting McCain pacing nervously in the background. When answering questions McCain frequently missed his opportunities to shine and all too often descended into bitterness, frequently flubbing jokes and inexplicably launching personal attacks on Obama, even going so far as to call him “that one” and accompany it with a prying fingerpoint across the stage. By contrast, Obama’s answers were well thought out and served him well, as yet again the differences in mannerisms between the candidates worked to his advantage. Not to mention Obama didn’t strangly pace about the stage and fiddle with his notes, unlike McCain, who apparently can’t sit still for more than 5 minutes while his opponent speaks. This must be the town hall equivalent of not looking at your rival when he is speaking to you.

Honestly, at the end I wasn’t convinced anyone really “won” the debate. But with the town hall format in McCain’s supposed favor, the night was once again his to lose. And lose it he did. Sure, he had more to say about the economy, but a draw at best was not what McCain needed. Once again, he blew it. And with the economy front-and-center in the next debate and the media narrative on McCain/Palin changing from “A Team of Mavericks” to “A Team of Nutjobs”, he’s running out of time to pull this one out.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter what I think of the debate; CNN, CBS, and even FOX News focus groups of undecided voters all declared Obama the winner by considerable margins and thought that he provided more compelling cases on everything from Iraq to healthcare to the all important economy. Wow, I guess even FOX can be right sometimes.

I’m going to open this up to reader discussion, but I personally think Obama handily defeated McCain in last Friday’s debate. Going into the event, the media narrative was that Obama would probably lose the night, helpless against McCain’s foreign affairs “expertise”. In my view the exact opposite transpired. Ironically, and through his own doing, McCain came into the debate beaten and broken with no bailout deal and consequently little to no debate prep time. Obama, on the other hand, calmly and masterfully articulated his foreign policy positions, making sure McCain’s attempts to mischaracterize them were unsuccessful. Obama needed to look presidential and credible on this issue, and he did. Don’t take my word for it- look at numerous post-debate polls and the real-time surveys networks like CNN took during the debate and you’ll see that Obama outscored McCain handily, especially with respect to independent viewers who widely considered Obama the clear victor. Ladies and gentlemen, we won on McCain’s strong suit, partially because of McCain’s own doing but mostly because we have a great nominee.

I invite readers to share their thoughts about Friday’s debate, as well as their expectations of the upcoming Biden/Palin “debate”.

I was tempted to avoid writing a post on this whole McCain won’t debate nonsense and just hoping everything would blow over today, but as evidenced by the “BREAKDOWN” lede on Drudge Report, clearly this bailout business will not be resolved in time for tomorrow night’s debate. This puts McCain in a considerable bind; worse yet one of his own construction. Basically, the only 2 variables are whether or not a deal is reached and how McCain responds with respect to the debate. Let’s examine some of the possible scenarios that may unfold in the next 24 hours (that is, between now and the scheduled beginning of the debate:

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