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Tie Goes to ObamaNeither candidate won a clear victory.

By John DickersonPosted Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, at 12:44 AM ET

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McCain was at pains to show that he knew the world very well. Almost every one of his foreign-policy answers had a little footnote. He'd either visited the region or talked to the leader in question. He sounded like Al Gore as he easily pronounced a host of complicated names and places with ease. (He got to "Tymoshenko" and "Yushchenko" so quickly and easily, it sounded like he was reading from Dr. Seuss.)

McCain, who had a bad week, looked at ease and in control. It may have been his best debate performance of the year. He delivered no zingers, but he also had no stumbles, and despite a few groaner jokes, he didn't lapse into too much boilerplate. Democrats had been whispering for days about his temperament. I mean, suspending his campaign to rush to Washington? What was that about? McCain's temperament seemed cool and even. His aides say that on the flight from Washington, he was joking and teasing his staff, even though he'd left a chaotic mess in Washington. McCain does seem to like chaos.

From a political perspective, McCain was surprisingly strong during the conversation about the economy. He made a call for accountability and then relentlessly hammered the overblown spending in Washington. The potential problem for McCain is that people may have heard "cut spending, cut spending" and not have taken away anything that will help them in their daily lives. Obama countered by returning everything he said on the economy to a discussion of the middle class.

Obama wouldn't talk straight when moderator Jim Lehrer repeatedly asked the two men to name cuts they'd make to accommodate the financial bailout. McCain did talk straight—suggesting an across-the-board spending freeze. That was candid but politically deadly. Obama has ads he can run about all the attractive-sounding programs that will be "cut" by such a freeze.

Obama is lucky that his "you were wrong" sound bite will live on past the debate, because at several turns he didn't stand up for himself. I can imagine Obama fans were frustrated their man didn't throw a few big punches. As the two debated Obama's position on meeting with foreign leaders, McCain repeatedly overstated Obama's standpoint. After several rounds of back-and-forth, Obama only tepidly asserted his stance. When they debated the economy, Obama challenged the idea that McCain could change Washington's spending habits after voting with Bush 90 percent of the time, but as he did so he petered out. He ended by mumbling, "I think, just it's, you know, kind of hard to swallow." Pfffft.

There was lots of great body language to read. Obama looks down when he's saying something unpleasant—like delivering an attack on his opponent. Obama looked at the audience more (as Kennedy did in 1960), McCain talked to the moderator (as Nixon had). When McCain was talking, Obama looked at him, like he was a listener. McCain stared straight ahead when Obama was speaking, which at times made it appear as if Obama was scolding him for denting the car.

It was a bit of a disappointment there weren't more fireworks, since the format was designed to have the two candidates engage each other. At one point the moderator nearly begged them to take each other on. It was not to be. Just a day earlier they had met in the White House separated by five politicians. On the stage, in Mississippi they seemed almost as far apart.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter.

Photograph of John McCain and Barack Obama by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images. Photograph on Slate's homepage by Jim Bourg-Pool/Getty Images.

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