McCain is trying to run out the clock and have the last word. He tries to go to experience as a closing argument, the idea that Obama needs "on-the-job training"—I thought this was change vs. change, but perhaps that's no longer operative.

Oh, and by the way, he was a POW.

McCain goes back to the well perhaps one too many times on "doesn't understand."

Obama returns to two issues: nuclear proliferation and actually taking on al Qaeda.

Last question: What are the chances of another 9/11 attack on the U.S.? McCain visibly thinks for a second before saying it's lower than it was the day after 9/11. He then turns to the 9/11 Commission as a major accomplishment.

Last question. But first a McCain interruption. "No one on earth is against solar." Will that come back to hurt McCain tomorrow?

Think Progress is doing real-time fact-checking.

More of McCain's travelogues. He's been everywhere! What a maverick.

McCain keeps saying that Obama is naive and doesn't understand things. I'm not sure that's such a great line for him. It doesn't have an impact.

10:19 Russia.

McCain just lost it over the Kissinger thing—hard to say how that will play with the Real Americans in the Heartland.

Brings up the Spain gaffe. OWNED.

Obama says the name right, and gets to the point: "I reserve the right to do whatever I think is best to keep America safe." Namechecks Kissinger, who agrees with Obama on this. Uses North Korea as an example of what happens when you embark on this policy.

McCain brings up the sitting down with dictators issue, but he bungles Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's name, badly, twice.

Both candidates try to tie Iran to Iraq from their own perspective, Obama getting the better end of it by tying Iran's rise to the Iraq invasion and eight years of cowboy diplomacy.

McCain brings up his nonsensical League of Democracies idea in the context of the Iran answer.

10:03 Iran.

Obama has a bit of a stunt reply: "I've got a bracelet too." Now he's hitting McCain on a poor choice of words: the "muddle through" quote. McCain's reply is that he's traveled to these places, a common retort of his I now finally understand: McCain's narcissistic worldview is such that a place isn't real unless The Maverick has seen it with his own two eyes.

Oh, here it is: "I have a record." That was the worst answer from either candidate yet. He's still talking, by the way—now he's going on about Iraq and gold-star mothers.

McCain's defensiveness is hurting him here. He keeps bringing up his own gaffes and drawing attention to it. Now he's rambling about every military action he's either supported or opposed. This is awful. What is he talking about?

Obama decks McCain on the Pakistan issue, bringing up bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb Iran and McCain threatening North Korea with extinction.

Unless I'm mistaken, McCain just confused Pakistan and Afghanistan.

9:50 Afghanistan.

The surge. Obama hits back on the judgment involved in going in in the first place. McCain wants to hear Obama say we're winning. This has been pretty deep in the weeds, but Obama needed to mention that everyone relevant has come around to his plan on this, including the Iraqi government. (UPDATE: Ezra Klein disagrees with me here:

Interestingly, Obama is MUCH more compelling on national security and foreign policy than he was in the domestic portion. McCain is agitated and shifting and giving awkward, digressive, angry answers. Obama seems confident and fluent and in control of this part of the discussion.

)

9:39 Iraq.

McCain rebuts: I'm a maverick, and so is Sarah Palin. Does he not realize that everyone hates Sarah Palin now?

Obama asks why McCain hasn't had anything bad to say about spending in the last eight years of Bushonomics. Verdict: Obama is killing.

9:37 McCain still talking about spending. Jesus Christ.

Lehrer wants to hear exactly what the crisis is going to do to the way these people will govern. Obama gives a solid answer that goes to priorities, bringing back the issue of $300 billion in tax cuts for rich people and corporations. McCain says he doesn't want to turn health care over the federal government; since Obama doesn't want to do that either, that point's a wash.

McCain says we need off-shore drilling and nuclear power. This was sort of non-sequitur.

Obama praises his Google for Government initiative. McCain had something to say about this, but Lehrer won't let either of them off the hook. How is the financial crisis going to affect your presidency? McCain wants a spending freeze. Obama says the problem with a spending freeze that you're using a hatchet when you need a scalpel. Good line.

McCain wants to cut defense spending. Why does John McCain hate America?

McCain wants to cut spending! Why doesn't he talk about this more?

9:26 Question #3, and Lehrer has abandoned all pretense that this is a foreign policy debate. Obama lays out his budget priorities, including alternate energy and fuel-efficient cars. He talks about health care and education as well, bring up the specter of the Chinese space walk as a measure of competitiveness. Infrastructure, especially new electrical infrastructure.

9:26 First appearance of McCain's creepy, creepy smile at the tail end of a heated exchange over taxes in which each called the other a liar.

McCain goes back to earmarks. Obama won't have it: "John, you want to give the oil companies another $4 billion."

McCain brings up his own Achilles heel, the health care tax cut! That answer spewed so much nonsense, Obama can hardly respond to it all—but he gets to the health care tax cut issue and lays it out clean.

McCain wants to cut the business tax. But he *really* wants to talk about earmarks.

Obama cuts him off when he starts talking about raising taxes and says "I don't know where John is getting his figures." Insists upon the fact that 300 > 18.

Obama says McCain's earmark talk ($18 billion) is dwarfed by the size of his tax cuts to the rich and corporations ($300 billion), pivots to growing the economy from the bottom up. This was a good comparison. McCain ignores the substance of what Obama said completely and starting talking about corruption.

9:14 Question #2: Are there "fundamental" differences between what you and Obama would do to lead us out of this financial crisis? McCain goes back to spending, and earmarks of all things, using the "We Republicans came to change government, and government changed us." Points to Obama's alleged earmarks.

Another age joke—After being instructed to direct his comments directly to McCain, Obama does so, prompting from McCain: "Are you afraid I couldn't hear him?"

McCain brings up his Cox gaffe, framing it in terms of a need for accountability. Obama responds with a pivot back to the Wall St./Main St. line, which he seems to be quite fond of.

Are you gonna vote for the plan, Senator McCain? "I sure hope so."

McCain opens with a shout-out to Kennedy, who is apparently in the hospital. Tries for an early age joke: "the greatest financial crisis of our time, and I've been around a little while." Kind of a rambling answer in comparison, though of course I'm biased.

Obama is giving a remarkably polished answer to this. (Debating pants?) Outlines his plan, hits Bush and then McCain on "eight years of failed policy."

Lehrer quotes Eisenhower: "We must achieve both security and solvency." Question #1: What's the deal with the financial crisis?

9:03 Here they are.

Debate #1 liveblog. Fingers crossed that Barack brought his debating pants.

I can't be bothered to look at the post-debate spin, but it seems clear to me from what I saw that the debate was a clean win for Obama. Maybe now he'll win Ohio too.

Another stupid final question: "What does your opponent have to do to prove they're ready to be president?" Obama goes first, ignores the question entirely, rightly, and goes on the attack against John McCain. Clinton goes a little bit valedictory again and throws out the idea of being the first woman president, which gets some applause.

And at last it's over. Tim Russert should be banned from public life.

Any statements or votes you'd like to take back? What an inane question. Hillary goes to Iraq; Obama goes to Terry Schiavo, which surprised me a bit. I think it was a good answer to a question I've never especially liked.

Williams: Obama, are you more liberal than Ted Kennedy? Throw in the towel, the moderators are done. Obama has prepared for this one, though, and handles it well.

And Russert won't let go of this either. Three or four questions in a row. Now Russert's trying to pivot from the Farrakhan question to the soft-on-Israel meme that's been pushed.

The best news for Hillary tonight is that Russert has probably made his own poor moderation the big story tonight. He's essentially shielding her from the consequences of her own negativity.

...Clinton jumps in and almost makes it sound as if she were going to go positive and protect Obama from Russert's bullshit. But instead, she tries to capitalize on it, valiantly wresting the mantle of "Douchebag of the Night" back from Russert in saying Obama hasn't rejected Farrakhan soundly enough. Obama jumps back with a joke: he says there's actually no distinction between denouncing and rejecting, but if Hillary thinks "reject" sounds stronger, he'll both reject and denounce. The crowd applauds, and MSNBC goes to commercial.

I said earlier that Obama seemed like the only competent adult on stage, but that may have been unfair to poor Brian Williams, who has been forced to sit and watch this disaster unfold and know he's going to get blamed for it tomorrow.

Farrakhan? Can't someone get a muzzle on Russert?

Tim Russert: Clinton, why won't you release your tax returns? I think there have been three questions of substance this entire night; everything else has been gotchas and Russert-style consistency traps. Her answer to this question was pretty bad, though—she says she'll release them when she becomes the nominee, "or sooner," but then says she can't get them together by Sunday because she's busy. She's had a lot of time to do this...

Tim Russert asks why Obama won't keep his word and go for public funding. He dodges, I think successfully. As an aside, I sure hope Obama doesn't get tricked into taking public funding.

Amusingly, Tim Russert ignores Obama's entire question and calls him a liar again. Tim Russert wins the world's worst moderator prize 2007-2008, hands down.

This debate is still a trainwreck, but I'm gratified that Obama is the only competent-looking person on the stage. Clinton tries to bring back Obama's answer on the credit-card interest cap, but Obama brings back "I'd vote for it, but I'd hoped it wouldn't pass"—an oldie but a goodie that gets some laughs from the audience. He gets in a jibe about taking money from the special interests, too, that looks good.

Now they're playing video about the "skies will open" mockery from Rhode Island last weekend. Obama shrugs it off, and Hillary laughs to try to shrug it off as well, and he goes into his usual answer about how this solutions-not-speeches business is baseless.

The Simpsons parodies Tim Russert a few years in advance:

"Mayor Quimby, you are well known, sir for your lenient stance on crime, but suppose for a second that your house was ransacked by thugs, your family tied up in the basement with socks in their mouths, you try to open the door but there's too much blood on the knob..."

"What is your question?"

"My question's about the budget, sir."

Brian Williams cuts Hillary off to go to commercial. This debate is a trainwreck, and it's everyone's fault but Obama's.

Luckily, my happiness with the way HRC tried to shut down Russert's absurd hypothetical scenarios quickly fades as she tries to go negative, once again, with Barack-hasn't-held-hearings-on-why-NATO-doesn't-love-the-U.S.-presence-in-Afghanistan-sufficiently-gate.

Tim Russert is engaged in some type of crazy speculation exercise—he's now asking the candidates that if we hypothetically withdraw at the hypothetical request of the Iraqi government, which then hypothetically falls to Al Qaeda, can we then hypothetically re-invade? What the hell is he on about?

And here he comes. "Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we can get out." Exactly right. This debate is not going well for Clinton.

HRC says she and Barack are the same on the war, trying it into her distinction between speech and action. I'm hearing unhappy murmuring in the audience. Barack is chomping at the bit to respond.

I should say that part of the reason HRC is having so much trouble tonight is that she decided to make NAFTA the key issue of the week. Why she decided to do that, I can't understand; it's not a winning issue for her. Question for Obama about Clinton's comparison with Obama and Bush is again pretty anti-Hillary, and again pretty leading—"How were Clinton's remarks about you unfair?" Obviously he would have said they were unfair regardless of how the question was phrased, but I'm not loving what I've seen of the moderation tonight. It's good that Clinton is being called out on her contradictions, but the way they're doing it is giving her ample ammo for her unfair-media spin.

Success! Cleveland.com has a stream that doesn't totally suck. I come back on another anti-Hillary question—what happened to all the jobs you promised Upstate New York?—but she spins this one very well, saying that "Back then I thought Al Gore was about to be president."

Going after the moderators doesn't seem like a great tactic, but apparently it's the one Clinton has chosen. The bits of this debate I've seen have all been Clinton on the defensive, and looking defensive. But I haven't seen much, because MSNBC can't deliver its web content effectively.

Between buffers, I gather NAFTA is now being discussed. Although I obviously haven't gotten any content because of the collapse of MSNBC's streaming video, I'm seeing on other sites that Clinton is "harsh" tonight, and Marc Ambinder says that a jibe about SNL got lightly hissed.

Obama's pushing the uncertain nature of the mandate enforcement mechanism. Or so it appears between bufferings. This is the best debate liveblog ever. I'll be back if this gets any better.

When my internet connection returns, they're still talking about health care. Then it goes out again. I'm almost glad.

Next is a Drudge report question. Still Hillary trying to defend herself; is MSNBC trying to give her ammunition for the "Media in the tank for Obama" narrative? Obama talks next, but my internet connection gives out and I can't actually hear what he says. Luckily, I've heard this argument about mandates 10,000 times already, so it's no big loss.

Starting now. First question right out of the box is about the contrast between the end of the last debate and her statements the next day—at last Tim Russert's obsession with absolute consistency pays off. Clinton is unrepentant; is she going to stick with "angry fighter" tonight?

The last debate between Clinton and Obama, just before Super Tuesday, didn't actually have all that much in the way of fireworks. Both candidates were on defense in anticipation of Super Duper Tuesday, and neither had much incentive to take risks.

Tonight is different, and for that reason likely to be much more intense. Clinton is desperate for anything that has a chance of turning the race around, and I'm expecting her to throw a whole lot of vitriolic nonsense out tonight in the hopes that something sticks. Barack, as always, goes into these things at a double disadvantage: not only is he not an especially good debater, but his lackluster performance in debates has a tendency to disappoint people who have only heard him on the stump. His advisers have had a few weeks since the last debate to train him to give quick, pithy responses to negative attacks rather than trying to carefully and systemically unpack the misleading things that have been said—let's hope they've done their job and that he's learned his lesson well.

I also hope he's been trained to go for the jugular a little bit more when he needs to, which has been not his forte in debates either.

As always, let's hope he brings his debating pants.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE: I'll be back tonight to liveblog, but in the meantime a sneak preview of tonight's debate is already available through the magic of the Internets:



Looks like a spicy one.

Longtime readers know that I'm not especially good at reading the tea leaves—remember Election Day 2004?—but it's worth noting that Clinton's people are not acting like they think they'll be in especially good shape after tonight. They're already putting out calls for more debates, including one at Fox News, which is already pissing some people off. We'll know in a few hours if it means anything.

The latest Rasmussen poll from California has Barack down by only 3%, with a third of the electorate uncommitted or undecided and the now-absent Edwards at 9%. (Via TPM and Daily Kos.) This is encouraging, but it's worth repeating word-for-word what my wise friend Shankar said in the comments to another polling post yesterday:

The thing about these polls is you really can't get a better sample for Obama than Sunday-Tuesday. It's just difficult to believe that the impact of those three days is sustainable by itself - the South Carolina win, the endless talk about the Clinton's negative tactics and divisiveness, the Kennedys endorsement. The intensity of feeling generated by all that is bound to fade at least a bit. He'll need to work hard to keep up the momentum with a strong debate performance and maybe an Edwards or (unlikely) Richardson endorsement.

As I said just down the page, it really all comes down to the debate: a perceived tie probably leads to a tie or close-enough loss on Super Tuesday, a perceived win revs up the enthusiasm and probably pushes him through to a solid win through increased turnout, and a perceived loss lets all the air out of the tires at the worst possible moment. Tonight is very, very important—to return to a metaphor I've used a few times before, it looks like tonight is the night the universe goes ahead and flips its coin.

I don't really have a sense of whether you guys are liking the recent focus on the Democratic primary or whether people just want me to get back to monkey news already—but one way or another I think the primary will be over tonight. There are only really four ways this primary can go from here:

* Knockout punch on Super Tuesday from Barack
* Long hard slog into March, which Barack wins
* Knockout punch on Super Tuesday from Clinton
* Long hard slog into March, which Clinton wins

I may be overly optimistic, but I'd put the likelihood in roughly that order, given that a) we live in a hyperattenuated media environment where the pace is constantly sped up and minor events have huge effects and b) the requirements for the perception of a knockout punch by Barack next Tuesday are much slimmer than a knockout punch for Clinton and as noted yesterday all the trends seem to be going his way.

(What do I mean by the requirements for a perception of a knockout punch? Barack's been down for months in all these states; he's still down in a lot of them. Good results nationally will look like a coronation, especially if he's somehow able to tie or beat her in California and the Northeast. Clinton, on the other hand, needs to beat him badly to be perceived as anything less than a collapsing front-runner.)

However, I have serious reservations about this informal ranking, because there's still at least one huge gamechanger in play: tonight's debate. If Barack does what he needs to do tonight—i.e., look tough, look presidential, stick to his positive tone while still pointing out that the Clinton administration in the 1990s was a pretty colossal failure and that Clinton probably can't even win this November against John McCain, much less win in a blowout like he can—then I think the last undecideds on Super Tuesday break for him and he'll get his knockout. But Barack is notoriously bad at this, and it makes me very nervous for tonight. In nearly every debate thus far his answers have been too cerebral and too slow, and in particular he doesn't respond well to the nasty and usually unfair attacks that are randomly leveled at him by Clinton. I hope he's had a lot of prep, and honestly I hope that he's been playing possum all this time just so he can come out of the gate tonight and blow everybody away.

If he "wins" tonight—winning defined in that peculiar sense of winning the perceptions game in the press, which often reduces to "getting in that one great line that can be played on TV over and over"—I think Barack wins, either quick or slow. But if he loses tonight, I think the undecideds and the Edwards supporters break the other way, Clinton gets her knockout punch on Tuesday and it's all over.

(And I mean that: she wins the nomination and then loses in November, taking the prospects for a progressive political realignment and massive generational shift down with her.)

In other words, tonight's debate is of transcendent importance for American politics, surely the most important of these incredibly stupid and artificial rituals in my lifetime thus far. It's Nixon-Kennedy II: The Rematch. So if you want to see history in the making, for good or for bad, find yourself a place in front of CNN tonight, and hope to hell that Barack brings his debatin' pants.