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The Debate. The morning after Philadelphia debate, I woke up and turned on my TV, only to find that a media consensus had already developed about the performances. On MSNBC, the anchors of "Morning Joe" were quoting--and agreeing with-- the New York Times' assessment that it was Obama's "weakest debate performance." Media groupthink was in full blossom. Other pundits suggested that Obama had looked rattled, weak, and unsure of himself. My reaction was one of surprise. Perhaps I had watched a different debate than did the vast punditocracy, but in the debate I watched, Obama had done quite well. Was I mistaken, or had the pundit class missed the forest for the trees? Let's examine:

On his MSNBC show, Joe Scarborough asked pointedly, "How could Obama not know that they were going to ask him about Reverend Wright and the 'bitter' comments?" Huh? Obviously Obama knew that he would be asked those questions. What he didn't know was that Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous would fixate on those questions for 52 minutes. It should have been clear to Scarborough that Obama had made a conscious decision to not get in a spitting match with Hillary during the debate; for that decision he has been pilloried by many in the media.

Just as he could have used his large financial advantage in Pennsylvania to blanket the airwaves with ads decrying Hillary's Bosnia fabrication, so he could have played attack politics during the debate. Obama simply chose to take the high road, understanding that neither he, nor the Democratic party would benefit from the tit for tat fracas that the moderators were looking for. He could have attacked Hillary on numerous fronts, but declined.

Take, for example, one of Hillary's favorite themes, the notion that all her "baggage" has been explored already, and that this has given her a kind of clean slate with the electorate; the idea is preposterous. It is precisely because of her baggage that Hillary would go into a general election with some of the highest negatives ever recorded by a candidate. Further, all of the many issues where Hillary has been accused of shading the truth--Travelgate, Filegate, her windfall profit in the cattle futures market, her knowledge of the Gennifer Flowers affair, even her fabrication that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary (he climbed Mount Everest five years after Hillary was born and was unknown before then)--are things that the Republicans would gleefully recycle during a general election, but which Barack Obama is far too principled to raise. Hillary's claim that she has been "fully vetted" notwithstanding, let me address one other issue that the Republicans would raise if she were the nominee:

Chelsea Clinton and 9/11. One week after 9/11, Hillary went on NBC's Dateline, and later the Today Show and claimed that Chelsea had been jogging near the World Trade Center during the attacks on the Twin Towers:

She had gone on what she thought would be a great jog. She was going down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She was going to get a cup of coffee and - that's when the plane hit!

The problem with this story is that Chelsea has subsequently written that she was at a friend's apartment, asleep, four miles from the World Trade Center, when the first plane hit. This fabrication has something in common with Hillary's Bosnia untruth; it is an unnecessary lie, told entirely for purposes of self-aggrandizement. Here is former Clinton associate Dick Morris on the 9/11 untruth:

So why did Hillary make up the story about Chelsea? Most likely it was because her co-senator (and implicit rival for the voters’ affection), a real New Yorker, Charles Schumer (D), spoke of his daughter, who attended Stuyvesant High School, located next to the Trade Center, being at real risk on Sept. 11. Hillary needed to make herself part of the scene.

Once can only cringe when reading this story.

Who Won? From where I sat, Obama actually came out ahead in the debate, for two reasons: First, even during the debate, he objected to the tabloid nature of the questions, and earned the respect of the viewing audience by refusing the invitation of the moderators to engage in mud wrestling. In addressing Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, he reminded me somewhat of Joesph Welch during the McCarthy hearings, decrying the flawed nature of the proceedings. Second, the debate so saturated the electorate with tabloid issues, that it actually put to rest "bittergate" and allowed Obama to get back on his populist message. And for anyone who hasn't understood the meaning of Obama's phrase "a new kind of politics," the Philadelphia debate demonstrated it perfectly. As Obama noted the next day, Hillary "was in her element," being able to lob hand grenades at her opponent. There are, however, times in life when being "not in one's element" is a good thing; that tawdry debate was one such time.

Is Obama tough enough? Since the debate, Obama critics have been quick to raise the question, "How can he stand up to Kim Jong-il if he can't be aggressive during a debate?" The answer is a simple one, but one that the pundit class keeps forgetting: The reason that the Democratic race is so dominated by trivia, gaffes, and personality issues is because there are no serious policy differences between the two candidates. It is because there are no major differences between Clinton and Obama that the campaign has devolved into nitpicking and mudslinging. Indeed, those watching the debate the other night breathed a sigh of relief that we weren't treated to 15 minutes of argument over mandated versus non-mandated health care. We no longer care about such policy minutiae. Once the general election starts however, the vast differences between the Republican and Democrat will once again elevate policy to center stage, and the nature of the discourse will improve considerably. I will guarantee that at that juncture, we'll see Obama's full toughness.

Does Hillary still have a chance? With each passing day, Hillary's chances of winning the nomination get smaller. The flow of superdelegates declaring for Obama is slow, but inexorable, and yesterday's endorsements of Obama by ex-Senators Sam Nunn (Ga.) and David Boren (Ok) were profoundly symbolic, because these men represent the conservative wing of the Democratic party. Another symbolic endorsement was that of Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labor. Astonishingly, Reich becomes the 5th member of Clinton's Cabinet to endorse Barack Obama. The others are former Secretary of Energy and Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson, former Commerce Secretary William Daley, former Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta, and Federico Pena, who at different points was Clinton's Transportation secretary, and Energy secretary. This speaks volumes about which candidate is the uniter and which is the divider. As I've stated before, Hillary's days are numbered.