Slipping Away?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 9, 2008 9:46 AM

CHICAGO, Oct. 9 -- After watching Barack Obama hit his stride at a boisterous Indiana rally Wednesday, I fired up the old laptop and came to a realization.

There is a growing acceptance among conservatives that Obama will probably be the next president of the United States.

You know how it goes after a big debate: Each side praises their guy and picks apart the other candidate. But if there's anyone seriously arguing that John McCain won the second debate in Nashville, I missed it.

Some pundits say McCain did well. Others challenged some of Obama's assertions. But many on the right were candid enough to say that Obama had won the evening. The most pointed grumbling, in fact, was directed at Tom Brokaw.

"I've never seen anyone who thought they won the baseball game walk off the field complaining about the last call by the umpire," Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs told me.

I saw it, too, in the somewhat deflated attitude of the McCain spinners at Belmont University. Gone were the usual overblown declarations of victory. "We remain in a very close race," Steve Schmidt said. "We have a tougher hill to climb than our opponent." In this political climate, he said, "we understand the difficulty of having an R next to your name."

It's more than that the battleground-state polls have broken in Obama's direction. It's that the economy seems to be crumbling, and everyone knows that doesn't favor the Republican nominee after eight years of Bush. The Palin boomlet has faded. The Ayers attacks don't seem to be getting much traction. And there is exactly one more debate for McCain to try to move a mass audience.

I'm not one for premature declarations. A month is a lifetime in politics. Wariness of Obama hasn't disappeared overnight. But in reading the mood of the pols and the pundits, my sense is that they believe Obama is close to clinching this thing.

The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes says Obama is now seen as a plausible commander-in-chief:

"John McCain had a very strong debate. It's too bad for him that it came on a night when Barack Obama was nearly flawless.

"The debate began with questions on the economy and for thirty minutes Obama answered those questions with the kind of substance that I suspect anxious voters wanted to hear and with exactly the right tone -- empathic, aggravated, and determined. Most important, he spoke to voters in their own language.

"Obama's test in the first debate was to present himself as a plausible president, as a guy who didn't seem out of place on stage at a presidential debate and wouldn't seem out of place delivering a State of the Union address. Much as I'd disagree with the policies in such a speech, it was clear that he passed that test. Tuesday night, his job was to persuade voters -- particularly independents -- not only that he could be president but that he should be president. I suspect polling in the next couple of days will provide evidence that he passed that test, too."

Instapundit agrees that Obama cleared the hurdle:

"In retrospect I have to say that I think Obama did better than it seemed at the time. This morning, my strongest impression is that McCain seemed to be trying too hard to close the deal, and frustrated that it wasn't happening. Obama, despite a lot of stammering and some ill-advised references to Delaware, seemed a lot more comfortable. I think he passed the threshold acceptability test with the audience, which -- for people looking for 'change' -- is probably enough."

David Frum chides his own side:

"Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for the next president, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting."

Even Hugh Hewitt is writing about "President Barack Hoover" -- no compliment, to be sure, but anticipating an Obama administration:

"They like Obama. I like Obama. Nearly everybody likes Obama. But I don't want to put the country through Great Depression 2.0, and I don't want a vast army of academics and social engineers descending on D.C. with plans on how to remake America in their own extremist image."

National Review's Byron York reports the anti-Brokaw sentiment from the GOP side:

" 'This was the worst-moderated debate in the history of presidential debates,' one McCain campaign insider told me just moments after John McCain and Barack Obama left the stage at Belmont University in Nashville. 'The audience and the American people should feel robbed -- that the one opportunity they had to ask questions of the presidential candidates was taken from them by Tom Brokaw.' . . .

"For much of the night Brokaw seemed to ask a question of his own for every question that came from the audience or from the Internet. If McCain's advisers were hoping for a genuine New Hampshire voter-interaction town hall experience, they didn't get it. Of course, neither did Obama, but after the debate Camp Obama didn't seem nearly as unhappy. They didn't see the debate as a true town hall -- the kind of event Obama has declined to participate in with McCain -- but they weren't particularly bothered."

At Power Line, Paul Mirengoff also tut-tuts Tom:

"Brokaw was a dreadful moderator. Instead of inviting the candidates to debate the answers their opponent gave in response to the audience questions, Brokaw interposed his own (often lame) questions. This was an impediment to real debate as well as an unwarranted intrusion by Brokaw into the 'townhall.'

"Naturally, the candidates at times brushed aside Brokaw's question and did what they were there to do -- debate each other in response to audience questions. This was one reason why the candidates kept exceeding the time limit. Brokaw should have (1) realized what was going on and stopped asking his own questions and/or (2) enforced the time limit. He did neither."

The liberal side seems convinced that Barack sealed the deal. The New Republic's John Judis makes the case:

"The second debate between Barack Obama and John McCain did little -- in fact I would say nothing -- to alter the outcome of the election. Outside of McCain's referring to Obama as 'that one,' which suddenly revealed the contempt he feels for the Illinois senator, there were no egregious statements that can be repeated over and over again on talk shows. What the debate proved, I think, is that Obama is becoming more comfortable with the idea of himself as president of the United States, while McCain is becoming ever more crotchety at the prospect of defeat.

"Sometimes, polls ask voters to characterize candidates with a single word. The favorable word most often used to characterize Obama is 'intelligent,' and the unfavorable word most often used to characterize McCain is 'old.' That pretty much fit how the two men appeared. Obama roamed around the stage gracefully. He seemed as much at home with the format as Bill Clinton did in his 1992 town hall debate with George H.W. Bush when he, too, felt victory in his grasp. Many of his answers were elegantly crafted. He would begin with empathizing with the questioner and by saying briefly how he would respond; then he would contrast his approach with McCain's; and he would conclude by elaborating on his response. The effect was to get this criticism across without seeming overly critical or negative.

"McCain, by contrast, was hunched over as he left his chair. He was halting in his answers. He repeatedly cited people and incidents -- such as Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover or such as his vote on Lebanon in 1983 -- that would have little impact on his listeners except to reinforce the impression of his age. He was grouchy and humorless."

I thought the whole "that one" flap was overblown, that it was just a lame joke by McCain, but the Nation's John Nichols is taking it very seriously:

"Understand what the Republican nominee was doing.

"He did not slip up.

"The McCain campaign and its media acolytes have for weeks been spinning the notion that Obama is running as some sort of messianic character who sees himself in something akin to Biblical terms.

"In internet advertisements, campaign spin and talk-show commentary, Obama is mocked as 'the one.'

"A McCain Web commercial from earlier this year compared Obama with the Nazarene. That ad opened with the announcer declaring, 'It shall be known that in 2008 the world will be blessed. They will call him "The One." '

"The ad proceeds to ridicule Obama's high-minded rhetoric before closing with the narrator telling Americans: 'Barack Obama may be "The One." But is he ready to lead?'

"That commercial has long been recognized as one of the more amateurish cheapshots from a campaign characterized all too frequently by amateurish cheapshots.

"Now, John McCain has brought the cheapest of the cheapshots to the debate stage.

"It was, for a senior senator who has embarrassed himself too many times during this long campaign, a uniquely embarrassing moment."

Arianna says Barack's presence neutralized the McCain assaults:

"Obama was the clear winner. He was centered where McCain was scattered. Forceful where McCain was forced. Presidential where McCain was petulant.

"In the first debate, McCain wouldn't look at Obama. In this one, he referred to him as 'that one.' The contempt was palpable, and unpalatable.

"In the run-up to the debate, McCain lowered himself into the sewer in a desperate attempt to portray Obama as dangerous, untrustworthy, a risk too big to take.

"But Obama's measured reasonableness totally countered that caricature. You could fault Obama for not being particularly inspiring, but you could not miss the rock steady competence he exuded -- authoritatively delivering substantive answers to questions on the economy, health care, taxes, and foreign policy."

The new Tina Brown site, the Daily Beast, is pretty intriguing. Here's her take on the debate:

"As always on TV, the moments were enhanced by the cruel physicality of the screen. The received wisdom so far has been that Town Halls are better for McCain because he can loosen up and relax and make direct contact with what are nowadays called 'real people.' But a Town Hall also meant the public saw a tall lithe young senator primed for the terrors of the future, against a stiff, hunched old guy hobbling around the stage in a body held together by an act of will . . .

"The younger man watched him from his Frank Sinatra stool with the look of a family visitor marveling at the antics of the household's resident crazy uncle.

"This is all horrible to those of us who once fell in love with McCain's flinty heroism and independence."

Another spurned lover from media land.