The Obligatory Debate Post *updated*

I will be the first to admit that I did not watch the debate Friday night between Senators Obama and McCain. Family obligations prevented me from watching it live, and a frantic rush to prepare for those obligations prevented me from recording the debate.

So I may have a slightly unique perspective on the whole affair. I came home late Friday night to dissect the debate post-mortems to find out what each candidate had to say. I was not terribly surprised (but dismayed nonetheless) to find that no one was really talking about policy, but rather about horse-race.

"Who won?" "Obama agreed with McCain..." "...McCain looked angry..." "...who made the worst blunder?" ... blah, blah, blah.

I'm not saying none of that matters. Maybe Obama should have been less concilliatory (I personally don't think so, on principle), or McCain should have been less angry; but I want to know what they said. Unfortunately, none of the punditocracy seems to care.

I'm admittedly intrigued by the debate over who won. This says a lot about the state of our media and our nation. It seems clear that the partisan-paradigm-filters were on full force on Friday night, because Republicans were clearly watching a different debate than the rest of the world.

Obama is a skilled, maybe even brilliant orator. He has excited the Democratic Party's voters like Kennedy, like Clinton. It's to be expected that Democrats will highly favor his performance, especially if he really did score points.

Independents also gave Sen. Obama the nod, thogh different polls disagree as to what amount. Further, post-debate polling shows that Obama moved a pretty fair amount of opinion to his side. So, the most pessimistic way to put it from obama's point of view is that he won a small victory.

What does the "liberal media" say? It's a tie. What do Republicans say? 90% say he won.

Huh?

What universe were they in?

**Update: Apparently, not all Republicans gave the debate to McCain. Some very prominent ones say Obama won.