Glad u signed on late, my daughter asked for help on a paper she had to do for school so we all watched the debate again & I got a second chance impression.
Your first point I agree with, as they both were well prepared and did good presentations with the content of what they had to say. The big difference was that Obama engaged McCain often wth his answers, agreed with some of his points and wasn’t afraid to say: “John was right” a few times as he began his rebuttal, and generally looked more relaxed and confident in his knowledge of the topics.

By contrast, although McCain was very knowledgeable esp in national defense issues, he absolutely REFUSED to look towards Obama to the point of being rude. He spoke as if Obama wasn’t even in the room. and to make an issue of this in a commercial just proves the amount of arrogance he displayed here. Most people I heard from thought this was one of Obama’s strong points; that he seemed more able to debate eye to eye, mano a mano.

As abbreviated as the foreign policy debate was, I thought Obama did an effective job aligning McCain with the policies of Bush and the last 8 years and with McCain’s party firmly in charge, that’s all Obama needed to do here.
McCain has the difficult task of having to debate against not only the Dems positions on the wars, foreign diplomacy, Russia, etc, but also his own Repub. parties terrible record on many of these issues. Try as he may to separate himself, I don’t think he accomplished this goal. He was too long winded about historical events as he recalled them, and i don’t think people care that much about the past.

So, I think if you simply look at both campaign’s spin following the debate, you can gauge how they really thought they did. Using how many times Obama agreed with their candidate as proof of his leadership skills is what the Repubs came up with. How lame is that!