The debate on split screen: Shades of Kennedy/Nixon in 1960

Though the post-debate snap polls and focus groups seemed to indicate a decisive win for Barack Obama in last night’s final presidential debate, John McCain caught one big break: The debate presentation on the broadcast and cable networks used the split-screen shot of both candidates sparingly, thus saving McCain from a fate akin to the one a sweaty Richard Nixon suffered in 1960.

Headline of the day: Yup, that’s how you do it

John McCain, lizard king: The tongue is the tell

Like the rest of us, presidential candidates are entitled to their weird tics.  However, John McCain’s periodic lingual spasms during the debate last week might rank among the strangest — and, in poker terms, most telling — in the…

While Biden issued warnings in Kosovo, Palin wept in a Wal-Mart

You could fill an undergraduate survey course in American history with the political, historical, cultural, and geographical differences between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden and their respective home states. One state is tiny, the other enormous. One state is the…

Video: Obama’s (annotated) debate criticisms of McCain on Iraq

HuffPost has assembled a short video of the passage from Friday night’s debate when Barack Obama ran down a laundry list of John McCain’s errors in judgments about the Iraq War, inserting clips of McCain’s own contemporaneous words on the…