DAVIS: Verdict on the debate: U.S. wins

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

When all is said and done, it was a draw.

As former senior McCain adviser Mike Murphy told David Gregory of NBC/MSNBC after the debate, “No game-changer: We’re going to have a rematch.”

For Sen. John McCain, however, a tie seemed like a good outcome compared with the previous few days.

Said a McCain team adviser, quoted in Mike Allen’s column in Politico on Saturday: “The debate was a tie, but it turned the page from our erratic handling of the bailout negotiations. A ‘McCain sunk the economy with a political stunt’ narrative is now ancient history. Now we get an improved bailout deal, calmer markets, and praise from House conservatives. We’re here back even and live to fight another day.”

I expected the John McCain who showed up at Ole Miss to be unprepared, tired, frazzled - and looking and acting like all of the above.

I was wrong.

Mr. McCain impressed me greatly all night - his civility, his dignity, his presidential demeanor. He started out by expressing concern for the great Democratic liberal lion, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who had been hospitalized.

He was strong and serious, yet not overbearing. He was tough on the issues and in contrasting his positions with those of Sen. Barack Obama - but respectful in his references to Mr. Obama (though, oddly, he seemed not to ever look directly at Mr. Obama, as Chris Matthews seemed to point out 56 times in 10 minutes of post-debate commentary).

Mr. Obama’s low point was when he tried to explain why he had said, in answer to a question asked during an early debate in the Democratic primaries, that he would be willing to meet with the five dictators of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria and North Korea “without preconditions … in the first year of his presidency.” (That was, in fact, the precise question, to which Mr. Obama answered simply, “I would.”)

Mr. Obama has many times since explained that what he meant to say was he believes in negotiations with hostile governments and didn’t mean his answer to be interpreted literally.

But Mr. McCain pressed the point, and Mr. Obama tried to say that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agreed with his position on U.S.-Iran discussions without preconditions. However, Mr. Kissinger over the weekend made the obvious point that this involved diplomats below the level of the president himself.

Mr. McCain repeated the line “Senator Obama doesn’t understand” a few times too many. The problem with the phrase, which was used to reinforce the argument that Mr. Obama is inexperienced and not ready to be president, is that Mr. Obama came across exactly the opposite: steady, knowledgeable, decisive, confident, presidential.

A potentially embarrassing post-debate factoid about Mr. McCain put out by the Obama operation has been to remind voters that Mr. McCain not once during the 90-minute debate used the term “middle class” (leading to an overnight ad by Mr. Obama’s rapid-response team titled “Zero”). On the other hand, the McCain campaign points out that Mr. Obama never used the word “victory.”

As for Mr. Obama’s performance, during the primaries when I was a strong supporter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, there were often times that he seemed unsure of himself, halting in his speech, sometimes indecisive - at least in the early Democratic debates.

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