Obama, without TelePrompter

Judging from the reviews, John McCain "won" the Saddleback non-debate Saturday night. (I didn't watch; Saturday night is when I watch "COPS" and "America's Most Wanted" with my kids, a family tradition.)

The big gaffe was Barack Obama criticizing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, with Hot Air catching the rookie senator starting to say Thomas didn't have enough "experience" to be nominated to the court:



Mark Levin:

Without a doubt, the lowest moment of the night was Obama's smear of Clarence Thomas. He, like Harry Reid, can't simply disagree with Thomas, he has to try to degrade him. On Obama's best day he can't hold a candle to Thomas's intelligence. Obama can barely make it through a press conference and ducks town hall debates with McCain because of his inability to speak in complete sentences when pressed to show his much noted but usually absent brilliance.

Dan Riehl notices Obama "looking to inject his opposition to the war into debate" by calling his opposition to the Iraq war "the most gut-wrenching decision" of his career, even though he was in the Illinois state legislature at the time.

New York Times:

Mr. Warren, who has made millions of dollars on his books, including the best-selling "The Purpose Driven Life," asked Mr. Obama to define "rich."
Mr. Obama responded impishly, "Well, if you've got book sales of $25 million . . . "
Mr. Obama, too, has made millions from his books. Mr. Warren reached across the desk and gave Mr. Obama a high five.

"Impishly"? What is a word like "impishly" doing in a news story? When I was a news editor at The Washington Times, I was a sworn enemy of adverbs. There might be occasions when a reporter needs to use "quickly" or something like that, but there is absolutely no excuse for using "impishly" in a news story. I'd have deleted that one without hesitation or explanation.

ABC's Jake Tapper:

[R]eviews seem to indicate it was one of the best -- if not the very best -- of McCain's speaking performances in this election cycle.

John Podhoretz:

If John McCain can perform during the three debates the way he is performing tonight with Rick Warren, he will win this election.

LA Times:

The Republican candidate had the easier task in the back-to-back interviews before about 2,800 members of the evangelical church in Lake Forest. He drew frequent applause with crisp answers intended to reinforce his conservative credentials.
Obama offered more nuanced and analytical answers on some issues important to conservative voters: abortion, same-sex marriage and stem-cell research.

"Nuanced" = MSM for "long-winded."
"Analytical" = MSM for "vague."

Drew M. at AOSHQ:

You'd think this friendly, personality setup would favor Obama but it's not. . . .
If I were Obama and his people, I'd be trying to figure out how to get out of the debates. The two of them just aren't in the same league.

Rich Lowry:

As for the social issues, tonight should throw a damper on the notion that Obama is going to make major inroads among evangelicals voters. Why would they vote for his social liberalism couched in exquisite equivocations, when they can vote for someone who agrees with them on most everything like John McCain?

Philip Klein:

Barack Obama will have his work cut out for him in this fall's debates if this is at all an indication of how the two of them perform on the same stage. . . . If this were an actual debate, it would have been a blowout.

And, as Phil says, "If you needed any more evidence that John McCain dominated, Andrew Sullivan has called it a draw."