It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

The old adage is true in baseball and it's true in politics. It ain't over 'til it's over.

What's over, for good or ill, is the 2008 presidential debates.

And, in three weeks, the election campaign will be over as well.

Speaking of the debates ...

I give a narrow edge in tonight's debate to John McCain, for a few reasons.

• I thought McCain seized the moment at the start of the debate while Barack Obama stumbled along. If the course of the evening's competition shifted, it started doing so about halfway through the debate, when the discussion moved to the nasty tone of both campaign's commercials.
  
  McCain seemed obsessive about his treatment by Rep. John Lewis and mostly remained on the defensive the rest of the way. But Obama never really took control of his opportunity.
  
  And neither candidate could give a satisfactory answer on balancing the budget.


• It shouldn't be necessary to do it, but McCain emphasized for Obama as well as the viewing audience that he is not George W. Bush.
  
  So great is the public's anger with Bush that the Republican nominee must remind the voters (as frequently as possible between now and the election) that Bush is not on the ballot.
  
  And basic American fairness dictates that one is not held responsible for the actions of someone else.
  
  But that doesn't mean the voters won't punish McCain, anyway.


• The fact that the debate was on domestic issues in an election campaign in which the economic dynamics clearly favor Democrats should have contributed to an easy win for Obama.
  
  But, while I give Obama credit for managing to introduce topics like health care into the discussion and thoroughly confronting the subject of abortion while answering the critical question of judicial appointments, I felt that McCain won the debate, if only because he was actually scoring points on economic questions — on what is, in effect, Obama's home turf.
  
  Perhaps it was a result of sufficiently lowering the pre-debate expectations.

Will McCain translate an apparent debate victory into gains in the public opinion polls? And, more importantly, will it lead to more actual votes in the election?