- Why McCain Won the Debate -

Or did he?

In any case, the MSM and blog consensus seems to be that McCain won narrowly but that Obama held his own, giving each a measure of victory. Of course, this is exactly what anyone who thought about it would have written as the most likely scenario before the debate—that is, presuming that neither candidate made a significant error. The point is that as soon as you step away from the spin zone of those who are going to declare their candidate the winner no matter what happened in the actual debate, the tendency is to not make any assessment that runs counter to the consensus that McCain is the master of foreign policy. What we are seeing in the reax is a lot of such riskless assessment that might as well have been written up before the debate.

This tells me that the MSM and the blogs don't really have a clue as to how to score a close debate.