Before the debate, we heard a lot about how good McCain is in a town hall format. There wasn’t much evidence of that last night. Time’s Swampland does a good job of explaining why:

In the classic McCain town hall, differences of opinion are expressed, and McCain works to build a conversation, so that everyone develops respect for him and each other, even if there is disagreement. In this debate, McCain was trying to convince voters and the audience that Obama was not worthy. So there was a stilted element to the affair. Finally, the key to the classic McCain town hall is that McCain is having fun. He did not appear to be having fun tonight. Obama, meanwhile, did not seem interested in having fun. He was there to make his case, and he did it clearly.

I’m starting to get used to the idea of President Obama. The economic crisis seems to have sealed McCain’s fate, even though he’s the one who warned two years ago about the problems of Fannie and Freddie, while the Democrats were saying everything was fine. After eight years of spending increases, the Republicans have squandered their reputation for greater financial responsibility.

I’m just grateful that Obama was not President in 2007. By the time he takes office, it looks like it will be too late to surrender in Iraq. Once it becomes Mr. Obama’s war, I doubt he’ll be eager to lose a war that is being won.

Is McCain’s call to suspend the campaign over the financial crisis an example of leadership? Is it a political ploy?

Yes.

Neo-neocon (I like her blog, but I LOVE her blog’s name) sums it up pretty well:

Just because there is some political posturing does not mean there’s not also some sincerity. Each candidate is revealing something about himself even as he jockeys for position, and they are running true to type.

McCain is an action man who doesn’t like to dither. He’s been in the Senate for a long time and has done a great deal of hammering out of deals, and he is comfortable in that arena. …

Obama is not a decision-maker, nor does he really feel comfortable in the Senate, having spent very little time there. He likes to sit back and study all the angles, and even then would prefer to let things emerge rather than taking a leadership role.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Now McCain has said he’ll participate in the debate (about 150 minutes from now as I write this at 6:30), and this is being reported as a cave-in and an embarrassment for McCain. Maybe. But blogger Nate Silver made the point a day ago (hat tip: Taranto) that McCain’s gambit has served to focus attention on a debate that nobody was talking about much.

If McCain does much better than Obama tonight, that will swamp the effect of the flip-flop on suspending the campaign. And while Obama is dramatically better with a teleprompter than McCain, there will be no teleprompter tonight. In a give-and-take discussion, my money’s on McCain.

My lovely wife, the self-taught Web Goddess, supports Obama (as does almost everybody we know in our blue-town/blue-state of Maplewood, New Jersey). I support McCain, primarily on the basis of the Iraq war issue. As I’ve discussed before, this makes for some careful-but-substantive conversations as the election drama unfolds.

Tempting though it may be sometimes to mock the opposing candidate, we know it can easily feel like mocking each other by proxy. Because we have an extraordinary personal bond, there is no worry that political differences might damage the relationship. But out of simple respect, we avoid excessive harshness and look for common ground, even as we state and stand by our opinions.

This model cannot, of course, be replicated in the broader society. Democracy depends upon the clash of ideas, and negative campaigning can be a highly effective way neutralize an opponent’s strength. However, excessive harshness can cause a backlash, as the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have found in their initial feeding frenzy over Sarah Palin.

Palin may have gone too far herself in mocking community organizers in her acceptance speech. Less than a day after Palin’s speech, Daily Kos launched the meme of Jesus vs. Pontius Pilate, and it’s gaining a lot of traction. On Facebook, if you search the popular Flair application for “Community Organizer,” you’ll find more than two dozen buttons making this point. The button at left is the one that comes up first, indicating more people have chosen that than any other similarly themed button. I mention this because this button was created by my wife Nina, whose graphic design skills led her to design a button more readable than the alternatives, featuring a red-blue color scheme that helps tell the story.

The Republicans are seeking to buff some of the harsher edges off of the meme — McCain’s acceptance speech made a nod to community organizing without using the term, and then on Face the Nation he explicitly said that community organizing is “very honorable.”

But I think the Jesus-vs-Pontius debate helps the Republicans much more than the Democrats. The downside for Republicans is it helps establish a High School Mean Girl image for Palin that will cost her some sympathy. However, what it does much more powerfully, I think, is emphasize two story lines that cannot help Obama: the experience issue (by all means let’s argue until Election Day about whether Obama has more experience than Palin), and the Obamessiah image that undermines the ability of many voters to feel comfortable with the idea of Obama in the very pragmatic and secular role of leader of the free world.

I take back everything I said or hinted or even thought about Sarah Palin being a drag on the ticket.

She did several things she had to do in her speech tonight:

• She established that her record of actual office-holding achievement compares very favorably with Obama’s. (Obama’s achievement of winning his party’s nomination for president is extraordinary and admirable. But as Palin said tonight, “this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform – not even in the state senate.”)
• She demonstrated the combination of combativeness and populist appeal that have given her an 80% approval rating from her fellow Alaskans.
• She showed she was ready — more than ready — to fill the customary VP role of attack dog on the stump. She even claimed the dog imagery for her own. I had already read the line, which she has apparently been saying for years, that the main difference between a Hockey Mom and a pit bull is lipstick. It seemed a little contrived when I was reading it on the screen, but when she said it, she owned it.

She took lots of hard shots at Obama, but by my count only one cheap shot. I wish she had left out the snipe that Obama’s worry about Al Qaeda terrorists is “that someone won’t read them their rights.” I don’t think that’s fair even as an exaggeration of anything I’ve ever heard Obama say.

But I loved the line that “Victory in Iraq is finally in sight … he wants to forfeit.” The “wants to forfeit” part isn’t literally true either, of course — but it’s certainly true that Obama’s pre-surge proposal to retreat-no-matter-what would have forfeited any chance at a positive outcome in Iraq.

My Obama-supporting wife — whom I love with a love that transcends space and time, let alone politics — didn’t like the speech. We both reacted negatively to the cheap shot on Miranda rights. But Nina was clearly pained to hear a man she admires attacked again and again, first by Giuliani and then by Palin. We watched the speech through different filters. Because I want McCain to win, I felt good about the effective, substantive, sarcastic hard punches being thrown at Obama — a man whom, as I’ve written before, in many ways I admire also.

Nina and I have virtually identical views on social issues. We both think the Republicans are on the wrong side of the abortion issue. Even more strongly, we both think they’re on the wrong side of marriage equality for same-sex couples. She was as angered and appalled as I was by the attacks of 9/11, and she knows the danger isn’t over. But we’ve reached opposite conclusions about which candidate to support. We respect each other’s decision, and we respect each other. We have in-depth, substantive discussions on the issues, but we’re careful not to mock each other’s candidate when we talk. That’s the way it should be in a marriage

But that’s not the way it’s going to be on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, negative campaigning works. Because it works, both sides have to do it. I wish it were otherwise — but no candidate has ever won a major election by staying entirely on the high road.

And so to bed.

I don’t agree with every word of this article, but I offer this snippet as evidence that Palin-bashing is a losing strategy for the Democrats:

Let me make it clear: there are many things I don’t like about Sarah Palin. We are ideologically opposed on numerous issues. Her stance on creationism and her pro-life zealousness are just two examples. Two big ones. … But the last two days of mudslinging against Palin have been so extreme, they have transformed her into an almost sympathetic figure in my eyes.

Obama’s reaction is to his immense credit:

”This shouldn’t be part of our politics, it has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president, and so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories,” Obama told reporters.

From The Corner:

Governor Palin is, based on her resume and achievement, better qualified than Obama to be president. … Obama has no important legislation to his name and no achievements that commend him to be President.

Based on what I know about Governor Palin so far, I think this is correct. Whether the sentiment will gain any traction is another matter.

I continue to think that McCain probably made a mistake in selecting Palin. But I’m less convinced it’s going to hurt him with moderates more than it helps him with conservatives.

The people making the most noise about Sarah Palin are already confirmed Obama supporters. But if people who are NOT already committed to Obama spend the next two months comparing the experience of Palin and Obama… I don’t think that helps Obama, especially given that he is running for President and she is not.

And to the extent that Democratic partisans go too far and attack Palin with Martian love child allegations, there will be a backlash among people who are not confirmed Obama supporters. Her record, credentials and campaigning skills are going to get a thorough airing. A lot will depend on how well she performs under pressure.

Update 2:20 p.m.: Turns out the Governor’s daughter is pregnant. This is, or should be, a non-event. It won’t even hurt her with the most socially conservative voters, especially since the daughter plans to carry the pregnancy to term and marry the baby’s father.

Obama opposed the surge, and McCain was its champion. Jonah Goldberg argues that the success of the surge will therefore favor… Obama.

If it were going worse, McCain’s Churchillian rhetoric would match reality better. But with sectarian violence nearly gone, al Qaeda in Iraq almost totally routed and even Sadrist militias seemingly neutralized, the stakes of withdrawal seem low enough for Americans to feel comfortable voting for Obama. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s support for an American troop drawdown pushes the perceived stakes even lower. …

Although the economy will dominate this election, McCain can still press his advantage on foreign policy. But not with I-told-you-sos. Re-arguing the surge is almost as counterproductive as re-arguing the war itself. Elections are about the future.

McCain doesn’t need to explain why he’d be a better commander-in-chief. Voters already acknowledge his superior judgment on foreign policy by huge margins. He needs to explain why, going forward, we’ll need that judgment.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t find a way to disagree with this. Thanks for bummin’ me out, Jonah.

The irony is that while a president has a tremendous, dominant impact on issues of war and national security, he has only a tenuous impact around the margins of the short-term economy. The next president, whoever he is, will enjoy an unearned boost in popularity from the economic upturn to come. Meanwhile the issues that matter most take a back seat, and the national security candidate gets penalized for the success of the course that he advocated.

If it’s going to become Mr. Obama’s war, I can take some comfort in the fact that at least he’s showing signs of an ability to think independently of the extreme pacifist wing of his party.

From the start, my take on Obama has been that he’s a talented and charismatic politician who some day could become an important senator.

For the most part I like him. I’ll be voting for the other guy, but if Obama wins, it’s not like I’m going to flee the country. Regardless of who wins, there will be things I like and things I dislike about the next president. If it’s Obama, the fact that a black man with a foreign-sounding name can rise to become president will be a powerful symbol of cultural evolution and the enduring power of the American dream. And symbols are important.

On a policy basis, my major disagreement with Obama is Iraq, the issue that in my mind trumps all others. I’m not a big fan of Hillary Clinton (although I voted for her husband twice — three times if you count the 2000 race). But as long as she was in the race I favored her over Obama. There’s barely a nickel’s worth of difference between them on most issues, but she seemed slightly less eager to surrender in Iraq, and to her credit she voted in favor of overthrowing Saddam. I also thought that as a female president, she would feel a need to demonstrate toughness (cf. Meir, Golda and Thatcher, Margaret).

From a character standpoint, my biggest concern with Obama was the very thing that endeared him to many others — the idea that he was “not a politician,” or was “a new kind of politician.” I never believed that to be the case… but enough people believed it that I had to consider the possibility. The idea of a president who is not a politician is scary. It’s like the idea of a Supreme Court justice who’s not a lawyer. There’s no law against it, and it might even work out OK. But it makes no more sense to put a non-politician in the country’s top political job than it would to put a non-lawyer in the top legal job.

But it turns out Obama is a politician. After winning the Democratic nomination by appealing to the young, the idealists, the activists and the pacifists, he’s swerved right so fast that many of his supporters have whiplash.

The anguish may be coming from the left, but conservative Charles Krauthammer has the best synopsis I’ve seen of “Obama’s brazen reversals of position and abandonment of principles — on public financing of campaigns, on NAFTA, on telecom immunity for post-9/11 wiretaps, on unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad.”

Krauthammer also makes a prediction I agree with:

“Obama’s seasonally adjusted principles are beginning to pile up… What’s left? Iraq. The reversal is coming, and soon…. He will use his upcoming Iraq trip to acknowledge the remarkable improvements on the ground and to abandon his primary-season commitment to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops.”

I certainly hope so. There was a political logic to being the champion of the surrender option during the primaries and before, when the war had been going so badly for so long. But now the war is going so well that the media and the public have largely lost interest — and General Petraeus still has half a year to consolidate the gains before the next president takes office. It seems likely that a broad consensus of the public will recognize how tragic it would be to abandon those hard-won gains and leave the Iraqi people to the tender ministrations of al Qaeda on the one side and the Iranian terror masters on the other.

So I still prefer McCain as commander-in-chief, but I take comfort in the overwhelming evidence that Obama is a politician. Politicians know how to maneuver around unwise campaign promises, and how to avoid being held hostage by their political base.