First Debate Thoughts

So do the Pakistani's - there's a link to it's native pronouncement on the Pakistan Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan

I guess you'd object if he didn't pronounce the capital of Scotland as Ed-in-berg?

simply because the McCain campaign has been trashing him for so long as a know-nothing, a lightweight, and a naïve bungler in foreign policy that the bar was set ridiculously low.

Obama FAR surpassed all expectations on foreign policy, and therefore wins this debate.

At a time when the McCain campaign has been seeing small but steady deterioration of support, especially among the women Sarah Palin engaged, McCain needed to come across as wise, steady, and reassuring.

Instead, he never looked at Obama, he never looked into the camera at the American people, and except for the ending comments when he told Veterans he loved them and would take care of them, (lies) never really connected.

He was a crotchety old man most of the night, dismissive, lecturing, condescending, and looked just plain mean and cranky, like the old man who tells you to get your goddamn dog off his lawn.

It certainly wasn't a blowout, but McCain won this debate.  Everyone had such high expectations for Obama, but he didn't deliver.  That in of itself is a victory for McCain, he beat the expectation game.

This debate will help McCain much more than Obama, because one of the major themes the Obama Campaign/MSM likes to push is is that McCain is too old and out of touch to be President.  They would have you believe he belongs in a nursing home.  That's going to be a hard myth to keep pushing when the 72 year old Mccain kept Obama on his toes the whole debate, and in my opinion, beat him.

As an aside, it sure is nice having a Republican that can actually hold his own in a debate (unlike Bush).

I found a couple of your points especially interesting:

"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."

I find it strange that anyone could still be for Laissez Faire economics given the current mess we're in. I'm not a fan of the bailout (I bought a house I could afford at the height of the market and paid my bills as its value sank - no one's more pissed than me right now) but capitalism always runs amok given enough time. It requires soft management by a nonprofit entity to set the bumpers (i.e., regulation).

"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."

You don't freeze spending in an economic downturn, you increase it on domestic programs. No, not welfare programs. Things like the NIH, DOT, DOE. Things that put people to work and improve overall standard of living. You pay for it by cutting military spending. Why DOD? Because we outspend the next ten countries combined, so there's more than a little room there.

I also found the idea of "sacrificing" to a better place laughable. This isn't like cutting taxes when going to war, or telling people to go shopping instead of kicking their foreign oil habit. This is like asking the market to dig itself out of the Great Depression. Oh, wait, we tried that. Thank God we replaced Hoover with FDR before all was lost.