Ideological debate

Most of my instant reaction was on Twitter, but here are some thoughts in no particular order:

• McCain did very well in keeping the debate on his own ground. Notice how long we were discussing the surge and earmarks. This is a strategy he perfected in the primaries, and it's what enabled him to win the nomination -- because the Republican base disagreed with him on everything else. He is a very insistent debater, and controlled the flow and subject matter.
• McCain schooled Obama on the later non-Iraq foreign policy questions, particularly on Georgia. To the extent this wasn't covered by the snap polling since it occurred later in the debate, this should be to McCain's benefit in polling the next 24-48 hours.
• The pundit class seems to agree this one was a draw.  There will be no rush to declare one man the winner like there was after the first 2004 debate. Kerry won the snap polls the night of the debate, but was winning 3-to-1 a few days later when asked who won. This made a 3-4 point difference in the polls.
• Obama is walking a fine line between professorial/detached and Zen-like/Presidential. You never know when he is going to slip into either mode. Debates are weird that way. They can turn liabilities into strengths and vice versa. 
• Obama pronounces it Pah-kii-stan.
• Obama seems to have a major burr under his blanket when it comes to free markets and regulation. In both this debate and his acceptance speech, he seemed to go to great lengths to make a philosophical case for activist government. This inspires me to work even harder against him.
• McCain looked like a leader in calling for a freeze in government spending. Obama's line about using a scalpel not a hatchet reeked of rearranging the deck chairs, and thinking you can have your cake and eat it too in the middle of a major financial emergency. One of McCain's major calling cards is service and sacrifice. In this way, Obama would be like Bush who didn't ask us to sacrifice after 9/11.
• Was Henry Kissinger the gaffe of the evening?

One of my favorite non-political blogs is The Future of News. Steve Boriss wrote a fantastic piece titled The Fight for Free Speech: Will We Be the Greatest Generation? about the idea of net neutrality. Referring to a NYT editorial, he says:

The Times ignores the fact that the First Amendment is designed to protect us against suppression of ideas by the government, not the private sector, which has neither the power nor the motive to suppress ideas.

This mistake that Boriss points out is, I think, the liberaltarian fallacy. It assumes that government action is going to protect you from business, rather than get coopted by business. Libertarians intituitively understand that this is absurd, but conservatives and, recently, Republicans, have been unable to make that argument. I suspect that we will not be able to achieve a majority until we have both an intellectually and politically serious critique of both government and big business. Read on.