By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
One candidate cited Churchill and Eisenhower, and described George Shultz, who served in Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, as a “great secretary of state.” The other promised anxious voters a federal budget that could be examined on a “Google for government” and accused his opponent of having a “20th-century mindset.”
The first presidential debate was more than a clash of ideology or temperaments. Barack Obama and John McCain did not even wrestle over the $700 billion economic bailout. Theirs was a generational collision, and at times it looked almost like a dramatic rendition of Freudian family tension: an older patriarch frustrated and even cranky when challenged by a would-be successor to the family business who thinks he can run it better.
Neither of the candidates took full advantage of the debate rules that allowed them to confront each other directly, and that reticence suggested the stiff politesse of two relatives determined not to ruin Thanksgiving dinner.
Mr. McCain, 72, repeatedly argued that Mr. Obama, who is 47, was not ready for the job: “I’m afraid Senator Obama doesn’t understand” and “What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand” and “Senator Obama still doesn’t understand.”
He deplored his opponent’s “naïveté,” though he stumbled slightly on the pronunciation of the Iranian president’s name, and twice repeated that he had not been elected Miss Congeniality of the Senate — some viewers might have wondered if he had forgotten that he had already used that metaphor. When Mr. Obama was speaking, Mr. McCain was at times fidgety, grinning awkwardly and shifting from foot to foot.
Mr. Obama was calm, still, poised and more businesslike than personable. He was trying to be like John F. Kennedy talking about the space race, but he often sounded like a technocrat.
He wore a dark suit and a flag lapel pin, and chose to focus on appearing steady and serious-minded and so ready to be president that he at one point sounded as if he already were: “I reserve the right as president of the United States to — to meet with anybody at a time and place of my choosing if I think it’s going to keep America safe.”
Mr. McCain felt secure enough not to wear a flag pin on his lapel, and comfortable enough to make jokes. “I’m not going to set the White House visitors’ schedule before I’m president of the United States,” he said. “I don’t even have a seal yet.”
Over all, Mr. McCain was more charming and more colloquial, but his speaking style was at times choppy. He described North Korea as the most “repressive and brutal regime probably on earth,” adding: “The average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean. A huge gulag.”
Denouncing government spending, he tossed in an example. “You know, we spent $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” he said. “I don’t know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue,” he joked, but so rapidly that some viewers might have been confused, or wondered if the candidate was.
His references to past cabinet members like Mr. Shultz and his 35-year friendship with Henry A. Kissinger reminded audiences of his experience, but also of his many, many years in Washington at a time when the nation’s lawmakers are held in the lowest of esteem.
And when he disagreed with Mr. Obama, he had a scolding tone. He seemed almost piqued that he had to share the stage with a man who had been in the Senate only four years.
“There are some advantages to experience, and I honestly don’t believe Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience, and has made the wrong judgment in a number of areas,” Mr. McCain said.
At least once, Mr. Obama shook off his detachment and threw Mr. McCain’s experience back at him.
“At the time when the war started,” he said, “you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni, and you were wrong.”
Particularly after so fractured and fractious a week, with two candidates in separate worlds, catapulting poison-tipped sound bites at each other across a vast, clamorous media no man’s land, it was almost startling to see them in the same room, on the same stage, behind matching lecterns, talking to each other, and past each other, for 90 minutes.
Mr. Obama was not particularly warm or amusing; at times he was stiff and almost pedantic. But all he had to do was look presidential, and that was not such a stretch. Mr. McCain had the harder task of persuading leery voters that he can lead the future because he is so much part of the past.
He tried to remind viewers of his greater experience and heroic combat career, while also casting himself as a maverick outsider ready to storm the barricades. Mr. McCain wanted to be the true revolutionary in the room, but his is the Reagan revolution, and for a lot of people right now, it doesn’t look like morning in America.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/us/politics/27watch.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&exprod=myyahoo&adxnnlx=1222531793-5Yk/dYDOSoR+JtXwo6KyEw&oref=slogin
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