I'm late catching up to this, but Mr. Swamp points me to this odd exchange in that CNN forum with former Secretaries of State:

AMANPOUR: So it's a gathering of like minds on the origin of climate change and perhaps on what we need to do about it. What does the United States need to do to take the lead on something that is so vital globally?

BAKER: Kill all the cows, because most of it comes from cow farts.

(LAUGHTER)

AMANPOUR: We're leaving that in.

BAKER: I know that.

If there's been a rookie of the year in this year's presidential campaign coverage, it's Nate Silver--a baseball stats guy who has turned his talents to politics and produced some of the most creative slicing and dicing of polling numbers at his website fivethirtyeight.com. Today's offering is typical Silver: he takes the snap polling results and weights them according to the issues the voters considered most important--and finds that Obama won, according to the cross tabs, on the more important issues, thereby accounting for his snap poll victories.

As for me, the more I think about it, the more McCain's performance annoys me. He seemed condescending and small throughout, whereas Obama was far more gracious and--I hesitate to use the cliche, but what the hell--likeable. For McCain's dismissive posture to have worked, Obama would have had to seem as uninformed and overmatched as, well, Sarah Palin. But Obama was as well informed--indeed, better informed--than McCain, even on foreign policy, McCain's alleged specialty.

Speaking of which, one wonders what the McCain campaign would be doing to Obama today if Obama, instead of McCain, had made the major foreign policy factual errors of the debate--calling Pakistan a failed state when Musharraf took over and screwing up the name of Pakistan's new leader. (And, once again, McCain continued to insist that the flagrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the leader of Iran, even though there's another guy, Ali Khamenei, was actually has the title Supreme Leader and controls Iran's foreign policy and nuclear program. But then, as ever, McCain seems unwilling to change his locutions in this campaign, even when they are proven false.)

In the end--contra Nate Silver--I think that character dominates issues in these debates...and McCain's discomfort--the effort he spent trying to control his temper--and disdain for his opponent did not wear well. I'm not so sure people are going to want him glowering in their living rooms the next four years...We'll see how this plays out in the looser circumstances of the town hall debate, which comes next (after the Palin-Biden festivities next Thursday).

No game-changer; the debate essentially a tie. Maybe a slight edge on points to McCain as he did put Obama on the defensive quite a few times although at the price of a crusty tone. Both campaigns will now employ first-rate funhouse mirror logic to claim smashing victories. McCain will say this puts him back in the race. They won't complete that sentence which should read..."after two weeks of Keystone Cops style bumbling around." The McCain campaign's all tactics/no strategy management style continues to hobble his campaign, but they are right that McCain did well enough in the debate to reset things a bit. The Obama campaign will claim that even a small loss in a Foreign Policy debate is a win for novice Obama. That's partially right, although the "win through losing" plan seldom puts anybody in the White House. Obama could have had a better night and internally I am sure there is significant frustration in Camp Obama.

The important issue is that the political environment is pushing the race in Obama's direction. McCain needs a very good next 39 days to curb that. He has no room for any more mistakes and his campaign has made plenty of them to date.

Some questions going forward:

After Hurricane CBS, does Sarah Palin now carry some actual expectations into her debate? As in proving she can do the job. I think so. I've argued since the beginning that on a strategic level she was a poor choice. She is now on the verge of being a real problem by election day.

Will Joe Biden react to the inevitable Democrat insider complaints about Obama's bloodless style by over-doing his attacks on Palin in their debate?

Will the Obama generals look at McCain's spending freeze idea and see a juicy opportunity for the traditional Democrat tactic of attacking the proposed freeze as dire "cuts" on the most vulnerable or on popular programs with a lot of political support? Team Obama is already shamelessly distorting McCain's position on Social Security... this would be an easy, if shameless, next step.

is underway. Campaign manager David Plouffe is already trying to set expectations low for the next debate, which will have a town hall format. He is saying that John McCain is the "'undisputed town hall champion," and that all they are hoping is to "escape unscathed."

Riiiggghttt...

From the video wizards at Time.com:

My evaluation. No grades, but a narrow win for Obama.

Correction: In my haste to produce instant analysis late last night, I slightly misquoted John McCain: He said the fundamentals of the economy were "strong," not good. Either way, it was a serious error--and the most significant sentence he has uttered in this campaign.

From TIME's Amy Sullivan:

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg ran a dial-group with 45 undecided voters in St. Louis during the debate, polling them before and after to judge how the event changed their reactions to Obama and McCain. The group was mostly middle-aged, split evenly among education and class lines, and was heavily comprised of Bush 2004 voters.
First things first, the group thought Obama "won" the debate (38 to 27%, with 36% saying that neither candidate walked away with a clear win). But that judgment didn't necessarily mean the Democrat won more support from the voters. At the beginning, they were all undecided; after the debate, half still weren't sure who'd they vote for and the remainder split evenly between the two candidates.
The biggest shifts of the evening came on perceptions of personal attributes and on the issue of national security. Although the first half of the debate focused on economic questions and those concerns generally rank at the top of voter concerns, these St. Louis voters didn't really hear anything that moved them. They responded positively to McCain's emphasis on reducing spending and they didn't respond negatively to anything Obama said about the economy. But at the end of the day, there was no shift in answer to the question of which candidate they trusted to handle the economy.
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 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.
McCain maintained his advantage of the questions of who voters trust on Iraq and who is seen as a strong leader. There was a shift in the judgment of whether Obama "has what it takes to be president," from 41% agreeing before the debate to 52% afterward. And Obama gained 11 points as the candidate who is seen as "being on your side."
Since this was the official foreign policy debate of the campaign cycle, it is perhaps most significant that Obama managed to chip away at McCain's advantage as the candidate voters trusted to handle national security questions. At the outset, McCain held a whopping 63-point lead on that issue; by the of the evening that had dropped to a 44-point advantage. That's obviously still a huge liability for Obama. But some of his biggest dial-meters of the night came during his remarks about Russia (particularly his work with Dick Lugar on loose nukes) and on his argument that Iraq has distracted the administration from the situation in Afghanistan.
Finally, Obama's comments on achieving energy independence were well-received and he improved his advantage on that issue from 20 points to 44 points throughout the evening.
As Greenberg noted while running through the results, dial group responses are often a bit exaggerated compared to the way ordinary viewers react to debates. But the direction of the responses is almost always consistent with the way polls and general opinion moves in the days following a debate.