interesting how when the debate started, neither of them seemed to want to talk to the other. i was starting to question their guts before they finally got into it and disagreed on a range of stuff- to my relief.
mccain seems the more pleasant guy to listen to, coming across somewhere between an uncle and a grandfather. he has that tradition of bush junior and reagan in speaking in a soft, easy-going way. by contrast obama is a more fussy speaker, granted with a more authoritarian voice, but also slightly more challenging to listen to in order to hear the point he's making.
i thought mccain was surprisingly well-prepared and energetic and obama suprisingly not as energetic or aggressive as he could have been. at times i wondered a little bit which was the 40-yr old and which the 70-yr old. one thing i think both men showed clearly was a presidential-level grasp of today's world, today's issues and the details that are a part of them. mccain also emitted a lot of experience which would make him seem a very logical and seasoned choice for president.
the biggest problem i have with mccain is that he is flat-out misguided on a few issues.
while he repeatedly said that obama "just doesn't get it," in reality he is the one who is bull-headed about the war being a good idea, to give one example. the reality is that the war is a disaster, never should have happened, has made our situation much worse in many ways, and needs to be ended as soon as possible. mccain still has this outmoded, foolish idea about "winning" or "losing" the war, giving examples of how losing the war would be letting our boys in uniform down. well, this is the kind of patriotic, macho baloney which we can no longer afford to indulge in IMO. as obama rightly pointed out, being in iraq has made iran stronger, given the taliban valuable time to reorganise, cost us a fortune, and made us look ridiculous in the eyes of the world. and we very much need the rest of the world's cooperation to deal with future problems like n. korea, iran and russia.
another foolish mccain stubborness was the idea of not sitting down with a leader like the iranian president without getting him to make some sacrifices first... which is what our attitude has been the last few years and which has accomplished us squat!
anyway, this will turn into a book if i go on, but in short mccain impressed in a superficial way and obama disappointed in a superficial way, but mccain, when you think about his reasoning ability, came off as the most wrong-headed potential president. part of a system which has brought us to the brink of ruin and needs to be dispensed with quickly, even if it means electing a guy like obama who ideally should not have run this election. but at least obama emits open-mindedness, intelligence and overall ability... as does biden.
EDIT: btw, the iraq surge didn't work. mccain is wrong again. a study came out of the u. of california assessing what the individual factors were which caused the drop in violence- it was an ethnic-cleansing that ocurred just before the surge.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080919/sc_nm/iraq_lights_dc