Steve Clemons is a very sharp guy, so I found his reactions to the debate tonight to be a little strange.  Let me clarify: I sympathize with a lot of his reactions, but I don’t know why a progressive realist thought he was going to hear things from Obama that would please him.  His frustration with Obama sounding like “McCain-lite” is understandable (even if this is nothing new about Obama), and I suppose I have shared this same frustration for over a year.  My fruitless crusade against the Obamacon delusion has been founded on the conviction that Obama’s foreign policy views are staggeringly conventional and in agreement with neoconservatism more than not.  Still, I sometimes wonder what his admirers among foreign policy thinkers expect him to say that causes them such displeasure when he restates positions he has held for months and years. 

One of the things that critics of Obama on the left seem to be complaining about tonight is how imitative of McCain on foreign policy he was, but what else was he going to do?  It’s not as if he was ever a contender for Dennis Kucinich voters, so why would he start talking like Kucinich?  Maybe it helps that I concluded that Obama was a hawkish interventionist a long time ago, so none of this disturbs me any longer.  It is what it is.  I have found the small consolation that he is at least a slightly more cautious hawkish interventionist, so that’s something.  Some of his progressive admirers still seem to bristle when he states positions on Iran, Russia or Palestine that he has more or less always held since entering the Senate. 

For instance, Clemons says:

It turns my stomach that Obama is defending Saakashvili.

Yes!  I have the same feeling whenever anyone defends Saakashvili, but that is what will happen when you insist on a MAP for Georgia and your running mate is chummy with old Misha.  Of course neither candidate will acknowledge that the Georgians escalated the conflict.  The establishment is foursquare behind NATO expansion, “democratic” solidarity and standing up to Putin, and perhaps no one more so than Obama’s running mate.  The electoral calculation behind this position seems to be that there are not enough ethnic Russian-Americans in this country who will take anti-Russian posturing ill, so there is basically no political downside to railing against Russian perfidy. 

Democrats probably have even less incentive to minimize their anti-Russianism because a lot of the ethnic Russians who are here, including immigrants and second- and third-generation Americans, seem to favor the Democrats anyway for a number of other reasons.   Yes, it is unfortunate that Obama felt compelled to back away from his original statement on Georgia that called for restraint on both sides, since restraint on both sides is necessary to end a conflict.  McCain wouldn’t know much about ending conflicts, though, since starting them is more his area of interest.  Even so, the candidate who backed the bombardment of Lebanon is someone who is either susceptible to pressure or already inclined to backing hawkish policies in many parts of the world.

Add Clemons to the small list of Obama supporters who thought McCain prevailed in the debate.  However, even here I think his high expectations for Obama (” I thought Obama would trounce McCain”) made Obama’s performance, which I think was far and away his best debate performance all year, seem worse than it was.  If there was anything wrong with Obama’s performance, it was that he holds foreign policy views that are so close to McCain’s on issue after issue that it will often sound to an audience as if Obama is always submitting to McCain’s will.  What really happened in the debate, though, was that Obama was gracious enough to acknowledge when he and McCain agreed and McCain was disrespectful and contemptuous throughout despite the remarkable convergence of their positions on the U.S. role overseas. 

Of course, that is imperative for McCain.  If he cannot scare the public into thinking that Obama is a lightweight McGovernite who loves dictators, he has absolutely nothing left to offer as an alternative.  Obama has already locked himself into a certain set of hawkish positions, and there is now little advantage in becoming less hawkish.  He has already changed enough positions for one year, and if there is one constant it is that Obama never changes his views to adopt a more anti-establishmentarian or marginal position.  As long as people keep perpetuating the idea, or the hope, that he is some kind of dove who represents some significantly different vision of America’s role in the world there will continue to be this shock and dismay when he restates the views he has held all along.  Meanwhile, it will be possible for McCain and his backers to frame Obama as copying and following McCain, when the unfortunate truth is that Obama came to many of these terrible positions all on his own long before the election season.

And the problem, John, with the strategy that’s been pursued was that, for 10 years, we coddled Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, “Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he’s our dictator.”

And as a consequence, we lost legitimacy in Pakistan. ~Barack Obama 

I — I don’t think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power. Everybody who was around then, and had been there, and knew about it knew that it was a failed state. ~John McCain

The problem with throwing around the charge that your opponent doesn’t understand this or that is that it makes it that much more important for you to get things right.  What is more embarrassing than how willfully wrong McCain is here is how his partisans embrace his ignorance as proof of what Obama does not know.  Here’s Jonathan Last:

The knowledge gap is beginning to show and it gets worse when Obama mangles pre-Musharraf Pakistani history.

What pre-Musharraf Pakistani history?  The wording here got my attention, since I was fairly sure that there were no direct references to pre-Musharraf Pakistani history on either side.  Technically, Obama exaggerated Musharraf’s tenure slightly to a full ten years, when he came to power in 1999, but his basic analysis of popular attitudes in Pakistan, the largely wasted military aid and the reinforcing hostility to the U.S. and “Busharraf,” as his critics lovingly called him, is pretty accurate.  For the reasons I have outlined, McCain’s assessment of Pakistan as a “failed state” is, at best, very misleading, and his claim that “everybody” thought this is almost certainly false.  Of course, at the time Washington condemned the coup, which Musharraf had launched to prevent being fired from his post as army chief of staff.  Washington had imposed additional sanctions on Pakistan, which were then lifted in exchange for their assistance after 9/11.  As ramshackle as Pakistan under the Sharif government may have seemed and may have been, little that has plagued Pakistan in 1999 has been significantly changed under Musharraf’s rule.  To imply that Pakistan was a failed and is not now, as McCain did, is not correct.  It is either more of one now, or it has remained one throughout, but it is hard to get away from the conclusion that Musharraf has made things worse on our dime.  

Once Musharraf was in power, the “our SOB” rationale was explicit, but it was usually reframed in neo-Kemalist terms: he was an enlightened dictator opposing Islamic extremism, which seemed to make his arbitrary rule more palatable, and we bought this line for years while raising Pakistan to the status of a major non-NATO ally and accordingly selling them expensive military equipment.  Finally, popular discontent with Musharraf, both because of his perceived subservience to U.S. interests and his own domestic excesses, boiled over and finally led to his resignation this summer, whereupon he was soon replaced by the widower of Bhutto whose name McCain can’t remember.  The man whose name McCain can’t remember was apparently one of the intended targets of the Islamabad Marriott bombing (he was scheduled to attend the iftar that evening), and he was the one who was recently drooling at the sight of Sarah Palin in New York, but McCain couldn’t even get his name right…and Obama was supposed to have mangled things related to Pakistan? 

When I see people, such as Yepsen, declaring that McCain got the better of the substantive side of the debate, I want to scream, because no one who knows anything about Pakistan could have come away from the exchanges tonight under the impression that McCain knew much of anything.

Update: One other thought on this.  For the sake of argument, assume that McCain was right that Pakistan was a failed state–are military dictatorships McCain’s idea of an appropriate solution to failing states?  If so, why does he continue to support the Maliki and Karzai governments and the broader “freedom agenda”?  But we’re probably going to be treated to windy pronouncements that McCain once again showed his mastery of the subject, which I suppose is all the greater an achievement when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

There seems to be an idea that name-checking Ukrainian politicians and Sevastopol, as McCain did, counts for something.  As Jim Geraghty says:

It’s a very, very different feeling than having George W. Bush at the top of the ticket.

Well, it’s hard to argue with feelings, but it seems to me that McCain was citing those details in an attempt to demonstrate expertise but ended up seeming like the candidate who felt obliged to rattle off a bunch of names to prove that he knows something about the subject, as if he was concerned that someone might think that he doesn’t.  Presumably, journalists already give him the benefit of the doubt when he talks about these matters, but as I heard it there was some similarity to the second presidential debate in 2000, so memorably spoofed by SNL, in which Bush dropped foreign names to show that he was not the clueless lightweight that a lot of people thought him to be.  In fact, that debate and the spoof of it resembled tonight’s agreement-fest more than a little. 

The break-up of the Ukrainian coalition government is not as obscure as talking about forgiving African debt, so in that sense McCain should get less credit for knowing what anyone who reads the news already knew, but what might bear closer examination is whether Bush’s old debate answers on foreign policy are substantially better or worse than McCain’s.  (Bonus quote from then-Candidate Bush: “There’s much more to life than the Dow Jones Industrial Average”–Republicans had better hope that people still believe that!)

And McCain forced Obama to debate Russia, Iran, and post-2007 Iraq almost entirely on Republican terms, something that would have been unthinkable as recently as the last election. ~James Antle

I’m not sure why he says this.  First of all, McCain didn’t force Obama to do anything.  Obama has been quite happy to accommodate himself to the Washington consensus on Russia, Iran and post-2007 Iraq without McCain’s help.  More’s the pity, in my view, but Obama reached these positions months or even years ago.   There is and was no meaningful difference between establishment Republican and Democratic views on Russia or Iran and in 2004 the Iraq debate was even more on Republican terms than it is this time.  Kerry was attempting to cast himself as the more credible candidate to conclude the war in Iraq successfully, but the notion of withdrawal was not even part of the debate.  Back in 2004, the great antiwar Obama was insisting on the importance of stabilizing Iraq, so to the extent that Obama held his ground at all on Iraq is an impressive statement of how far public attitudes and the Democratic Party have shifted.  Since Kerry’s defeat, antiwar Democrats have become much more forthright and influential with their own party, perceiving in Kerry’s lame “reporting for duty” me-tooism the cause of Bush’s re-election.  On Russia, ever since the end of the Cold War Democrats have traditionally been more meddlesome and obnoxious concerning NATO expansion, Balkan interventions, Kosovo and the Caucasus.  McCain has managed to outstrip them in his hostility to Russia, but even this is a fairly recent development.  KLA thug Hacim Thaci was a guest at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 (which may have helped to push Serbs to vote for Bush and allowed him to win Ohio); Richard Holbrooke continues to be taken seriously for some reason; Biden has been at the forefront of every expansion of NATO since 1996 and seems to love Saakashvili almost as much as McCain does.  If there is a Democratic alternative view on Russia and policy in the Balkans and Caucasus, I would be interested to know what it is. 

On Iran, even Howard Deanmade more belligerent noises about the Iranian nuclear program in 2004, and it has become a minor Democratic hawk talking point that the administration attacked the wrong country when it invaded Iraq.  Obama has felt compelled to take a hard line against Iran throughout the campaign.  The debate over meeting with leaders of “rogue” states is something of a distraction, since there is no disagreement about ends.  In all of these things, McCain offers the impatient, intemperate expression of the same policies that Obama presents with a calm and cool demeanor.  One might argue that Obama makes these dangerous policies more palatable by making them seem more sane, but equally one might argue that what has been happening over the last four or eight years is simply the convergence of both parties as they both move toward terrible policies all over the world.

Incidentally, people often pronounce “Rye-hahn” as “Ray-hahn.”  I don’t lose too much sleep over it. ~Reihan

It’s a good thing that I don’t rely on Bollywood movies to guide my pronunciation.

On a serious note, Reihan is right that it isn’t a huge blunder to misremember Zardari’s name or mispronounce Ahmadinejad’s name.  It probably should undermine McCain’s claim to be some kind of legendary master of foreign affairs just a little, but I am reminded of Clinton’s difficulty pronouncing Medvedev during a primary debate, which was not as important as the fact that she knew who he was and what role he was playing in Russian politics.  The thing that is troubling about McCain is not that he said Ahmadinejad’s name wrong on one occasion, but that he thinks demagoguing against Ahmadinejad is the equivalent of having a real Iran policy or that he thinks Ahmadinejad is in charge of the Iranian nuclear program.  I would rather have someone who didn’t pronounce Putin’s name correctly but didn’t want to go to war with Russia over Caucasian states in which we have no vital interests rather than having the reverse.  The thing to bear in mind is that on substantive policy questions McCain fails the test time and again.  He could be fluent in Farsi, and nothing would change his horrendous judgement on foreign policy.

Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin.

The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as “disastrous.” One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, “What are we going to do?” The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is “clueless.” ~Ed Schultz

Six days to the VP debate, that is.  Add this report from Schultz to the first call for Palin to step down from the ticket from a former supporter, and you have the makings of total disaster for the McCain campaign in this next week.  The word disaster was honestly the first that came to mind when I heard the VP announcement as I was driving back to Chicago.  I remember saying, to no one in particular in my car, “Total disaster.”  Because I don’t want McCain to win, I wasn’t concerned that choosing Palin was a disaster for his chances, but I nonetheless felt a sense of wonder about it in the way that insane, futile attacks on fortified positions might inspire a certain strange admiration.  I wondered at the time, “What could they have been thinking?”  Of course, they had been thinking, “Mac wants Lieberman, which is even more insane, so let’s settle for the merely deranged.”  Now they are paying the price.

After the Republican convention, I joked that the convention theme was, “Can we have a mulligan?”  It seems to me that the McCain camp would very much like a do-over on the VP selection, but they know that if they dump Palin now it will definitely be over.  If he dropped her now, or if she resigned for whatever reason, the combination of media triumphalism (the narrative would be, “so much for experience and judgement!”), liberal Schadenfreude and conservative despair would be so great that McCain wouldn’t stand a chance.  Even though his result is now more likely to end up resembling Dole’s rather than, say, a respectable Ford-like defeat, he will have to trudge on and accept whatever happens.  He might even earn some grudging respect late in the day; perhaps some generous Obama supporters will liken his campaign to the charge of the Light Brigade.  He is, after all, so very concerned about Sevastopol, as he reminded us tonight.  The entire Palin episode has been like some drunken bacchanalia that gave way to a terrified awakening several weeks too late.  When her critics were painting her as a new Eagleton, her supporters were laughing at them as lunatics filled with hate, and now they are beginning to think that the haters may have been onto something.  The GOP is experiencing self-immolation, and I can’t say that I am very bothered by that.

Aside from the reliable yes-men at NRO and some of the other large conservative blogs, I am having a hard time finding anyone who thought that McCain did better than stay even with Obama tonight.  The idea that McCain won the debate seems not to have crossed the minds of anyone not already deeply committed to stopping Obama, which suggests that McCain’s performance was worse than it might at first appear.  As the “underdog,” as he constantly calls himself because he has been lagging behind all year, he had to expand his voting coalition beyond the true believers who think that his obsession with the “surge” is a serious foreign policy position.  As a member of the incumbent party, he had to define himself as sufficiently different from the administration in both style and substance to lend credibility to his theme of reform.  These are not necessarily mutually exclusive goals, but he achieved neither of them.  As much as I hated Obama’s me-tooism on foreign policy, it would not have appeared to be me-tooism to undecided voters, but would have sounded like the statements of a hawkish liberal, which is what Obama is, and blunted McCain’s non-credible attempts to paint him as the second coming of McGovern.  Both of them outlined terrible policy views, but Obama conveys them with a reasonableness and balance that McCain simply doesn’t have.   

The problem that McCain had was that he could have given this performance back in January or earlier and he wouldn’t have had to say anything different, which was a good indication that he was just falling back on the same old tropes he always uses when talking about any of these issues.  In addition to that, he made a series of mistakes and false statements from the trivial (bungling names of foreign leaders) to the much more serious (distorting Obama’s position on withdrawal), his combative style did not sit well with a lot of his audience and his contempt for his opponent–a key part of his political style–came through and worked to his disadvantage.  It is impossible to separate this from the events of the last week.  No one not already supporting him could have found McCain’s non-answers on economic and domestic policy persuasive, and after his flighty behavior in response to the financial crisis he had to demonstrate a sobriety and poise that he simply doesn’t have.  Despite McCain’s efforts to portray himself as the underdog against a one-term Senator named Obama, which is actually pretty far-fetched when you think about it, Obama remains the challenger and benefits from anti-incumbency sentiment regardless of his accommodation with status quo views.  McCain needed to persuade undecided and independent voters that it is worth gambling on another Republican administration as the current Republican administration goes down in flames after eight years of failure, and he didn’t get anywhere close to doing that.  The worst thing about McCain’s performance is that it was just about as effective as he has ever been in a debate, but it doesn’t matter, because he has too much ground to make up and an opponent formidable enough to keep him from doing that.

Update: Jim Antle is an exception to the rule.  No fan of McCain’s, he thinks the Republican nominee did better:

McCain simply pinned Obama’s ears back during the foreign policy and military exchanges. I don’t agree that his nonsensical campaign suspension and bailout participation aided this in any significant way. But I haven’t seen an old Washington hand mop up the floor with a smarmy, inexperienced but glib pol like this since Cheney kicked Edwards’s posterior in the 2004 vice presidential debate. Obama was on the defensive most of the time, and his “not true” interruptions were mostly ineffectual.

I don’t know about this.  It comes back to the differences in style.  McCain and Obama said almost identical things on foreign policy aside from Iraq, which leaves the undecided voter trying to discern between the presentation of these nearly-identical views.  As a matter of style, I am at a loss as to how anyone could rate Obama the loser.  On substance it is pretty clear to me that where McCain and Obama differed the latter was the winner.  For instance, it seems to me that if I am the average undecided voter, it doesn’t make much difference whether supporting Musharraf was a good or a bad idea, but more informed viewers will know that after about 2005 or 2006 no one could really mount a credible defense of our unstinting support for Musharraf.  McCain was not only flacking for a discredited Pakistan policy and tied himself to Bush’s last-ditch support for Musharraf needlessly, but he made a faux pas in identifying the last period of Pakistani civilian rule as equivalent to being like a failed state, which implies that he thinks Pakistan is once again a failed state (and, by extension, perhaps he favors another military coup?).  Given the tenuous state of U.S.-Pakistani relations today on account of incursions and strikes into Pakistan, which McCain has criticized talking about but apparently does not oppose doing, this is the sort of thing one does not say out loud about an allied country even if it is true.  By the same standard that he chastised Obama for his remarks on strikes into Pakistan, McCain is guilty of the same kind of blunder, except that it comes at an even more delicate time in relations with the country in question and effectively belittles the civilian government. 

The regular viewer might not have picked up on the debatable claim that Pakistan was a failed state c. 1999, but I’m pretty sure there are regional experts who would dispute that description if the technical definition of failed state and the criteria of the Failed State Index are anything to go by.  Actually, when people hear the phrase failed state they think, not unreasonably, of places such as Somalia and Afghanistan, so what McCain said tonight was that Washington should continue to provide copious amounts of aid to a state that is on the brink of imploding.  Pakistan has a lot of problems and its state is weak in many parts of the country, but it simply doesn’t make sense to call it failed when it possesses an organized military, a semi-functioning administrative apparatus and a nuclear arsenal.  It may be dysfunctional in many ways, but that is a pretty long way from being failed.  Here is one definition of failed state:

A state that is failing has several attributes. One of the most common is the loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Other attributes of state failure include the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, an inability to provide reasonable public services, and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.

There are parts of Pakistani territory where at least part of this description might apply today, just as it could have been applied to parts of Pakistan for the last sixty years, but having relatively ungovernable or autonomous regions does not mean that the entire state is failing. 

To the extent that you can call Pakistan a failed state, of course, you must call Iraq and Afghanistan under U.S.-backed governments the same things, except that they are even worse.  Furthermore, under Musharraf’s tenure since they have started ranking countries Pakistan has become progressively worse.  Foreign Policy‘s Failed State Index for the last two years has listed Pakistan at 12 and 9 respectively on the list of most failed states, so it is certainly not doing very well, but the gradual worsening of conditions in Pakistan vindicates skepticism of Musharraf’s rule rather than support for it.  McCain’s lauding of Musharraf, based in no small part I imagine on Musharraf’s own fantasies of being an Ataturk-like figure for Pakistan, is obviously misplaced, and a well-informed audience would recognize the extent of his blunder.  If I were an Obama partisan, I would be hitting McCain, ostensibly the great foreign policy master, on this for days to come.  If McCain demonstrating his lack of understanding is what “pinning back” Obama’s ears means, I should think Obama would welcome more of it.

Second Update: For once, undecided voters and I have a similar reaction to something.  From the Stan Greenberg focus group:

Both candidates saw their net favorability ratings rise over the course of the evening. McCain started off with a 22-point net and gained 9 points. But Obama went from a 6-point net favorability to plus-45, a shift of 39 [bold mine-DL] points that placed him higher than McCain at the end of the debate (69% versus 62%).

McCain was seen as the more negative of the two—by 7 points before the debate and by 26 points after. The audience did not like it when he went after Obama for being “naïve” or used his oft-repeated “what Senator Obama doesn’t understand” line. When the two clashed directly in the second half of the debate, with Obama repeatedly protesting McCain’s characterization of his statements or positions, the voter dials went down. Voters appear to have judged McCain too negative in those encounters and Obama more favorably.

If improving one’s position with undecided voters is the real goal of presidential debates, it is hard to doubt that Obama helped himself much, much more than McCain did.

Obama’s opening statement was his standard theme, complete with a reference to a “defining moment,” and McCain’s was an appropriately meandering answer that somehow ended up talking about job creation and foreign oil.  He seems to have been taking lessons on how to give answers from his running mate.  Now he’s bragging about his call for Cox’s resignation, and returning to his old song about the evils of greed and corruption.  Convergence continues–both will vote for the bailout. 

McCain naturally follows up by saying that we should control spending.  He’s back on his hobbyhorse: earmarks are a gateway drug!  Pork and earmarks are evil!  Studying the DNA of bears is bad; Alaskan studies of seal DNA is presumably desirable.  Oh, no, Obama supported earmarks!  McCain is actually going to make the argument tonight all about earmarks.  He’s already losing and we’re not even through the first half hour. 

Is it just me, or do their fiscal disputes seem absurd in light of their agreement on the bailout?

“Two thousand!  Two thousand” McCain says, talking endlessly about earmarks.  Obama is doing quite well, especially as compared to some of his clumsy primary performances.  McCain is starting to let his contempt for Obama show.  He keeps laughing like some sort of disturbed gremlin.  Obama has avoided his old habit of disjointed, professorial answers.  McCain is back on his anti-spending kick.  Ethanol subsidies and earmarks are in his sights!  He is making a solid effort at avoiding the questions about priorities, unless he thinks ethanol and unnecessary defense contracts are the burning issues of the day.  His answer is a more elaborate “finding efficiencies” response.  Lehrer notices that neither of them answered the question.  Now Obama is fumbling as he tries to avoid committing to anything.  Google-for-government has made a return appearance.  Lehrer is getting annoyed.  McCain: let’s have a spending freeze on everything except defense, veterans’ benefits and entitlements, which is to say the vast majority of the budget.

This debate seems strangely disorganized. 

It took 40 minutes for McCain to mention the “surge.”  It seems that the debate over the war tonight is going to be another exercise in talking past one another: the “surge” worked, the war was wrong, we’re winning, took our eye off the ball, and repeat.  McCain: stop talking about the past!  Let me now rehash Obama’s record on the “surge.”  Obama: you want to talk about the past?  I’ll tell you about your views on Iraq!  McCain: Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy (of course, McCain thereby shows that he doesn’t understand the difference, since he has called the “surge” a new strategy countless times).  “Let us win!” McCain says in his best Rambo impersonation.  McCain is in his full-blown self-righteous mode.  I can’t imagine that undecided voters are responding well to his tone, but then I don’t really understand undecided voters.  McCain stupidly reminds people that Obama wanted soliders out of Iraq last March, which is what people want. 

Obama makes his points about Afghanistan, showing that he does actually know what strategy means and McCain does not.  Now he’s on to Pakistan–look out!  Wait for the McCain “he wanted to bomb Pakistan” rebuttal.  And…there it is!  He’s actually right that there needs to be Pakistani cooperation, but he doesn’t seem to understand that the problem with launching strikes without their permission is not just something you shouldn’t talk about but also something you shouldn’t do.  He also doesn’t seem to know Zardari’s name.  Obama reiterates his bad idea about launching strikes into Pakistan without their permission, but gets a good dig against McCain’s belligerency.    McCain: it’s okay if I want to start a war with Iran, because I once opposed sending soldiers to Lebanon.  McCain goes down his roll call of different interventions, inexplicably reminding people that he supported interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.  Obama: “You don’t muddle through.”  McCain: Obama didn’t go to Afghanistan earlier! 

On Iran, McCain recites the usual litany: no second Holocaust (there isn’t going to be one), no arms race (there might be one, which would make the Iranian threat much less dangerous), we need a League of Democracies (stupid!).  He has pretty effectively avoided answering how any of this relates to U.S. national security.  Obama works on his anti-Iranian hawkish pander, claiming (falsely) that he has always supported labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.  Obama scores the easy point that the League of Democracies is useless in handling Iran.  McCain bungles Ahmadinejad’s name.  Now it’s time to talk about talks “without preconditions”!  Obama scores another easy point by citing Kissinger’s endorsement of talking to Iran.  Obama makes his preparation vs. precondition distinction, which he uses to obscure what his original answer on this last year really was.  Obama hits him on the Zapatero gaffe.  McCain keeps repeating his claim that he would be “legitimizing” other regimes, which is the basic error of his view.  McCain is getting petulant.  How in the world has Henry Kissinger become the center of this debate? 

Obama: Russia is very aggressive and a threat to the region; Russian actions were unwarranted.  Russia has to leave South Ossetia and Abkhazia (good luck with that one!).  Affirm fledgling democracies!  He rattles off names of small countries.  MAPs for Georgia and anybody else that wants one!  But no Cold War–this sounds just as ridiculous as when Palin says it.  Oh, and nonproliferation.  Despite having sold out completely on this issue, Obama is still getting hit for “not understanding” so-called Russian aggression.  McCain: There’s a pipeline!  (It’s a pipeline that had nothing to do with the war, but there is a pipeline.)  McCain waxes poetic about Saakashvili as usual.  The two of them are indistinguishable.  It’s very depressing.

Best other liveblogging line of the night comes from Alex Massie:

McCain says “off-shore drilling is a bridge.”  To Nowhere, obviously.

McCain lies about Obama’s position on withdrawal.  All the things that annoy me about Obama’s position (premising withdrawal on conditions on the ground, consulting with commanders “on the ground,” etc.) McCain pretends don’t exist.  McCain is a flat-out liar.  Weirdly, after pushing back against McCain all night, Obama lets McCain get away with it.

McCain: “There are some advantages to experience, knowledge and judgement.”  If only he had the knowledge and judgement.  Did McCain just claim that he is the more flexible candidate when it comes to foreign policy?  This is crazy stuff. 

Happily, it is now finished.

Update:

A poll of undecided voters rated Obama the winner 40-22% with 38% saying it was a draw.  That is more in line with my impression of how the debate went.  Maybe I can understand something about the mind of undecided voters after all.

Also, the theme song of the week, since Kissinger has been in the news a lot lately: an old classic.

Second Update: Quin Hillyer and the CNN viewer panel rate Obama the winner.

Third Update: Halperin grades Obama as having done better than McCain.  The CW has now been firmly entrenched.  The telling thing is that this has happened in a debate for which a lot of us assumed McCain wasn’t very well-prepared (he was busily grandstanding in D.C. saving the world, after all) and focused on a subject where McCain is supposedly some grand master and Obama is allegedly a novice.  Obama proved that the idea that he is somehow not well-versed on foreign policy is nonsense.  From here on out, McCain is in a lot of trouble.  In future debates he can’t just keep saying, “Earmark reform, drill, baby, drill, maverick” and expect people to pay attention to what he says. 

Steve Benen grades the performances with almost the same marks that Halperin and Andrew give.  Especially after the last two weeks that the McCain campaign has had, McCain really needed a decisive win to give him a much-needed boost.  His bailout-related stunt, at best, neither won nor lost him anything, and at worst it will saddle him with the bulk of responsibility for whatever Congress produces or fails to produce.  If a deal is reached, and most Americans hate the bailout idea, McCain will suffer the backlash; if the deal fails, he is excoriated by pundits and journalists until Election Day.  Considering all of that, McCain’s possibly eking out a tie with someone whom he regards as a naive fool is actually a serious defeat.

Fourth Update: Frank Luntz’s focus group responded more favorably to Obama.  Curiously, that focus group wanted more emotion from McCain and not from Obama, whom a lot of bloggers seem to have regarded as too detached.

Fifth Update: Are there any Republicans who still wish Palin could have filled in for McCain?  I didn’t think so.

There are other reasons to doubt that the failure to pass the bailout, which seems more likely today than it did two days ago, will lead to the sort of catastrophe that bailout advocates have been insisting on all week.  Small banks are functioning and even thriving as deposits have started flooding into them, and credit from these banks does not seem as if it will be drying up.  The main argument that bailout advocates have had that has made their proposal sound slightly more attractive has been that the complete freezing of all credit would adversely affect the entire population, but if that is not true or significantly exaggerated a major part of both the economic and political rationales for this bailout disappears.  As Todd Zywicki at Volokh Conspiracy has noted, the CEO of BB&T Bank has also raised a number of major objections to the original plan and answers the question cui bono? that most observers have tried to dodge or ignore by insisting that the alternative is unthinkable:

The primary beneficiaries of the proposed rescue are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The Treasury has a number of smart individuals, including Hank Paulson. However, Treasury is totally dominated by Wall Street investment bankers. They do not have knowledge of the commercial banking industry. Therefore, they can not be relied on to objectively assess all the implications of government policy on all financial intermediaries. The deicison to protect the money funds is a clear example of a material lack of insight into the risk to the total financial system.

That tells me that there is reason to doubt the dire warnings that we have been given.  It is also instructive that the bailout deal keeps getting delayed, and now seems much less likely to pass the House without the support of the House GOP.  The House majority does not want the bulk of the responsibility for passing the deal and wants political cover by having most of the Republican caucus vote for it.  As long as that seems unlikely, it is possible that the deal may not happen.  The obvious question is why the House Democrats would not want to take the lion’s share of credit for saving the day, if that is what the bailout will actually do.  One reason why they do not want to own this deal is that they are hearing the same overwhelmingly negative reaction from their constituents as the GOP members are.  The intensity of opposition to this proposal is as great as anything since the populist backlash against the immigration bill.  To give you a sense of how unpopular it is, Kansas Sen. Roberts’ office says that it has received fewer than a dozen calls out of 5,000 that support the bailout.  Even if support for the measure is closer to 30% of the public, the intensity of the opposition is much greater.  It is possible that this sort of grassroots rejection of the nearly universal establishment position is going to prevail again.   

I would add here that the record of bipartisan “achievements” and attempts at legislation over at least the last decade are a major contributing factor to the lack of public confidence in the administration’s proposal.  It may prove to be mistaken, but there is reason to think that an establishment that has been so impressively wrong about so many things over the years is wrong this time as well.  When the government has consistently abused the powers granted to it for addressing this or that crisis, and when the establishment’s interests seem to be consistently at odds with those of the vast majority of citizens, it becomes increasingly difficult to grant them any more power.  At some point the establishment cannot command respect because it frittered away whatever authority it had on blunder after blunder. 

Even so, the Democrats may be willing to back the deal if it appears to be a bipartisan move, as they hope that bipartisan support will reduce the backlash against them.  That is one of the main political benefits of describing things as bipartisan: creating more targets for blame.  That brings us to the more basic point, which is that the majority would pass the deal if its members actually believed it to be necessary.  Clearly, Pelosi wants the Republicans to provide cover because she cannot muster the votes on her side, and she can’t do that because not nearly enough have been persuaded by the argument the administration has presented.  Part of this is a resentment over being burned by past deception and incompetence, but another part is that the administration’s argument is not persuasive.  This goes beyond a lack of trust in this administration or in government as a whole.  The argument is not persuasive because it seems fundamentally wrong, which the administration’s own lack of credibility exacerbates.