2008 Presidential Debates

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.

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 age of electronic media. Casual observers might have assumed McCain had perhaps gobbled a mound [...]

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 oldest, the other the newest. One state leans the deepest shade of blue, the other [...]

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 subject. And all in less than two minutes. Recommended.