The Sunday Paper Staff Blog

In answer to the all the emails this morning, here’s how I scored last night’s debate between presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama: Unfortunately for the many Americans still struggling with making a decision, it was a tie. I thought Obama performed better than McCain on the economic part of the debate and that McCain applied, in the words of an NBC commentator, “an ass-whuppin’” to Obama on foreign policy. The problem for McCain in the first part of the debate, the economic part, is that although he is, quite rightly, crusading for a clean-up of Washington’s financial practices, Obama was able to bring the economic debate to the kitchen table and that, my friends, is where presidential races are decided—through kitchen table economics. We all want Washington’s finances cleaned up, but I don’t think McCain succeeded in laying out exactly how a Washington clean-up will help you and I. It will, most definitely, by cutting government spending and allowing us, as a country, to pay off some of our massive debt. It’s a smart, no nonsense, way to go about cutting back on spending, but I don’t think that McCain succeeded in getting that across. However, please note, neither of these gentlemen was particularly strong in this area. Jim Lehrer had to ask the same question three times—“What will you have to give up [from your plan] as a result of the bailout?”—and still didn’t get a clear answer from either one. But, Obama kept the talk on the Main Street level. Then, came McCain’s undeniable trampling of Obama’s derriere on foreign policy. McCain knows foreign policy probably better than anyone in Washington. He’s seen its history which is extremely important to foreign policy because it is something that is built over decades, not four-year administrations. To make matters worse for Obama, McCain called him out on his Kissinger fib. Kissinger was livid that Obama would claim that he, Kissinger, favored a sit-down with Iran’s Ahmadinejad (and yes, I always have trouble with that name, too). Most of the pundits on CNN, Fox and NBC agreed that there were no sound bites from the evening, but there were. Probably the best was when McCain, regarding Obama’s suggestion that we attack Pakistan, said, in exasperation, “You don’t say that out loud!” It highlighted Obama’s naïveté. Obama, for his own sake, should go ahead and admit that he was wrong about the surge. Otherwise, McCain’s going to keep using it against him. Stay tuned, though, because the tables will be turned on foreign policy next week for the vice presidential debate when Joe Biden will face off against GOP pick Sarah Palin. Biden has a lot of foreign policy experience, unfortunately for the Dems, most of his experience runs the gamut from bad to embarrassingly bad. There is no love lost between Biden and the military, and it would be a smart move for Palin to look at how Biden interacted with Gen. Petraeus in September 2007 and make hay with it.