Debate Shows Obama Not Ready to Lead

Here's John McCain's new ad buy slamming Barack Obama as "Not Ready to Lead":

Neither candidate in last night's debate emerged as a clear winner, although many leftists concede that Obama's performance was far from spectacular.

Barack and Michelle Obama don't look all that pleased with the performance, for example, as seen walking off stage immediately following the debate:

Meanwhile, CNN has a lead story with the headline, "Round 1 in Debates Goes to Obama, Poll Says."

Yet, as Noah Pollack reports, more Democrats watched the debate, and were thus over-sampled:

Buried way, way down at the bottom of the story — hopefully, one surmises, past the point where anyone would read — is the following:

The results may be favoring Obama simply because more Democrats than Republicans tuned in to the debate. Of the debate-watchers questioned in this poll, 41 percent of the respondents identified themselves as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans and 30 percent as independents.

I’m far from being a polling expert, but this is obviously a slanted poll.

Pollock's right, which means that the consensus among the punditocracy is accurate as well: John McCain, not known for powerful oratory, did better than expected, and in fact was successful in highlighting his towering foreign policy credentials in contrast to Obama's inexperience.

So what's the left to do?

Focus on any angle they can to keep up their relentless smears against the GOP ticket. The fertile ground? McCain's "lack of eye contact," which is apparently the opening Josh Marshall needs to paint McCain as angry and psychologically unstable, even animal-like:

Here's one comment we got from TPM Reader EO ...

As a psychotherapist and someone who treats people with anger management problems, we typically try to educate people that anger is often an emotion that masks other emotions. I think it's significant that McCain didn't make much, if any, eye contact because it suggests one of two things to me; he doesn't want to make eye contact because he is prone to losing control of his emotions if he deals directly with the other person, or, his anger masks fear and the eye contact may increase or substantiate the fear.

I noticed him doing the same thing in the Republican primary debates. The perception observers are likely to have is that he is unwilling to acknowledge the opponent's legitimacy and/or is contemptuous of the opponent.

And here's another note from TPM Reader TB. I guess I'm really not sure quite how to characterize it ...

I think people really are missing the point about McCain's failure to look at Obama. McCain was afraid of Obama. It was really clear--look at how much McCain blinked in the first half hour. I study monkey behavior--low ranking monkeys don't look at high ranking monkeys. In a physical, instinctive sense, Obama owned McCain tonight and I think the instant polling reflects that.

So McCain may have given away his status as a low-ranking monkey. I'd never even considered monkey rank.

It turns out that the attack-potentional arising from the psycho-simian meme looked so promising that Marshall checked out his commenter's scientific credentials, which - joy! - turned up as legitimate.

Hooray! Obama's poor debate performance may not turn out so bad after all!

The Illinois Senator's not only got CNN in the tank for post-debate polling manipulations, but the nihilist leftosphere can perform clean-up work with a novel round of "McSimian" attacks (and make themselves look even more racist simultaneously - Obama a "high-ranking monkey"? Sheesh...).

It's just keeps getting better...