(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

Based on their past performances in primary debates, John McCain substantially exceeded my expectations. Barack Obama performed no better or worse than I expected. Neither candidate made a serious miscue or breakthrough that will swing millions of votes. Although neither candidate ever achieved anything remotely approaching a knock-out punch or even a knock-down blow, McCain took more swings at Obama than vice versa, more of his shots actually landed, and overall they did more damage.

This debate will leave the campaigns essentially tied, which in the dynamics of this unusual election season is a strategic victory for McCain-Palin.

McCain avoided seeming mean, grumpy, or old-and-confused, but yet he was consistently the more aggressive of the two. I think that's a hard combination for John McCain to pull off, especially when he's probably quite weary, but he did. He didn't snap or snarl a single time, but neither was he ever meek.

The Obama-Biden meme of the past week has been "McCain is impetuous and lacks a presidential temperament," and that is, in all candor, one of McCain's greatest potential vulnerabilities. But it was a meme that Obama could only make stick if McCain blundered by seeming impetuous and intemperate tonight. And Obama was far too cautious to risk trying to provoke a show of the McCain temper by deliberately needling him. No doubt to David Axelrod's great disappointment, McCain didn't fall into the trap, but rather busted it.

Moreover, if — as I expect — an economic bailout bill of some sort passes next week, McCain will be able to claim at least partial credit both for getting the necessary number of skeptical House Republicans on board and for getting their concerns at least partially addressed by the compromises made as compared to the original Paulson-Pelosi-Frank plan. McCain will emerge looking like a courageous legislator, statesman, and grown-up. Obama will end up being confirmed as an immature poseur.

McCain isn't naturally as charming as Ronald Reagan was, but neither is he without charm, and such charm as he does have showed through. He didn't have as strong a moment tonight as he did during the GOP debate in which he explained that he couldn't vouch for whether the Woodstock concerts were really a great cultural and pharmacological experience because he was "tied up at the time," but such moments are rare, and to be effective they can't seem contrived. The victors in the betting on how often tonight McCain would mention his POW experience were definitely those who "bet the under."

Obama was, I think, on auto-pilot tonight — McCain's disruption of Obama's pre-debate preparations this week was a tactical coup, because it kept Obama from polishing up and getting his best game face on — and Obama's natural dynamic advantages of youth and energy were self-governed down to levels which effectively neutralized them. My guess is that he desperately wanted to deny any doubters in the audience with latent racist tendencies any occasion to see him as an "angry young black man," and that for the vastly larger, entirely non-racist American audience, he wanted to avoid seeming disrespectful.

That leaves Obama only with the upside that has always been predicted for him in these debates — viz, the credibility that enshrouds a very junior and unaccomplished senator from being recognized and treated as an equal in this hallowed setting. But he was going to get that by default, and I don't think tonight's exposure added very much for very many voters beyond that which he'd already managed with his "Obama-as-Apollo" routine at the Democratic National Convention. Obama was, thus, precisely the same candidate who never definitively closed the deal on the Democratic nomination during his final primary debates against Hillary Clinton, and who won instead by running out the clock on a narrow lead built early and in improbable places.

Unlike the primaries, though — in which votes, once cast, mostly stick rather than evaporate (although Obama proved they're subject to erotion through manipulation of the Dems' ridiculous mixed primary-and-caucus system) — Obama's current lead is only in opinion polls, and opinions are volatile and unreliable. The ticking clock therefore can't give Team Obama the same degree of comfort in the general election.

I don't agree with the conventional wisdom that a tie goes to Obama, and I don't think this was even a tie. Obama is still the greater unknown of the two candidates, and the most vulnerable to last-minute jitters in the voting booth on election day. Obama needs these debates to open a big lead that will be immune to last-minute erosion, and he did not advance that goal tonight. That's the main reason why, in the big picture, he lost this debate.

The commentary I've read has been effusive in praising Jim Lehrer, but I reluctantly and respectfully dissent. Lehrer has earned the respect of the candidates and the public, he has appropriate gravitas, and he is entirely genial and respectful himself. He made no effort to engage in gotcha journalism or to steal the show, and he was a model of fairness. These are all essential qualities, and I don't think anyone else currently on the scene could do these particular things as well as Lehrer did them tonight.

Nevertheless, a moderator's job most important job is to sharpen the contrast between the candidates and help them more clearly define the differences between them. At that, Lehrer utterly failed tonight. His questions were so vague that he might as well have just said, "Sen. Obama will now ramble for twelve minutes on anything even tangentially related to the pending economic bailout bill," followed by "Now it's Sen. McCain's turn to ramble." And that's exactly what both candidates did: It was as if you'd filled a shoe-box with their 10- to 90-second sound bites from earlier in the campaign, tumbled it end-over-end a few times, and then pulled the results out at random. There was simply no coherence to the discussion, especially in the first third, no way that voters could mentally put each man's statements across from each other in parallel columns and compare them. Indeed, neither man was even at his best in regurgitating those sound bites.

Perhaps because they were both tired from the events of the past week, or perhaps because neither is, by nature, a commanding and intuitive debater, neither participant was able to lift his efforts beyond the very low bar that Lehrer's questions set. From the standpoint of actually explicating or generating enthusiasm for either side's policies, neither side had a particularly good night.

That frustrates my sense of political aesthetics, but from a strategic and relative comparison, but it's another overall plus for McCain: Obama's appeal depends on clever programs and multi-point proposals far more than McCain's. Thus, the secondary reason why, in the big picture, Obama lost tonight is because Obama failed to convert on one of his most precious opportunities to effectively sell those clever plans and multi-point proposals.

I do not expect the vice presidential debate to remotely resemble tonight's. To begin with, moderator Gwen Ifill will not be nearly as vague and deferential. In tonight's bout, the two fighters spent far too much time flailing weakly at each other from the clench, without referee Lehrer doing much to break them apart.

But most importantly, the Veep debate will be the first opportunity for Gov. Sarah Palin to be heard at length since her acceptance speech. Most folks don't realize that in addition to debates during the 2006 Alaska GOP gubernatorial primary, Gov. Palin participated in something like 24 debates in 45 days against her two general election opponents.

Gov. Palin knows how to jab and move, and when she gets an opening, she can punch way harder than some folks expected. I also think she'll benefit from being misunderestimated — both by the public and, probably, by her opponent — coming in. As with her convention speech, I await the Veep debate with some trepidation, but mostly with gleeful anticipation.