I’ll probably have to catch most of tonight’s big event on the replay later. I’ll update this post when I have a chance.

Use this thread to tell us what you thought about how Obama and McCain did in the debate, or to share any opinions about how the presidential campaign is going.

UPDATE: noneed4thneed is liveblogging the debate on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/commoniowan

SECOND UPDATE: I saw only a few minutes of the debate live, and I’ll have more to say after I watch the rerun.

The snap polls are giving it to Obama:

Update [2008-10-7 23:7:30 by Todd Beeton]:CNN’s snap poll: Obama won 54%-30%. Also, Obama’s favorables went up a net of 8%, McCain’s were UNCHANGED. Wow.

Update [2008-10-7 23:13:28 by Todd Beeton]:From Jonathan in the earlier thread: More actual results… CBS polling of undecided voters gave Obama the win by a 39 percent to 27 percent margin, with another 35 percent rating the debate a tie. Another wasted opportunity for the McCain campaign.

GQR focus group of undecideds split 42 percent for Obama at the end versus 24 percent for McCain.

More details on that CBS poll:

Forty percent of the 516 uncommitted voters surveyed identified Barack Obama as tonight’s winner; 26 percent said John McCain won, while 35 percent saw the debate as a draw.

After the debate, 68 percent of uncommitted voters said that they think Obama will make the right decisions on the economy, compared to 55 percent who said that before the debate. Fewer thought McCain would do so – 48 percent after the debate, and 41 percent before.

Before the debate, 59 percent thought Obama understands voters’ needs and problems; that rose to 80 percent after the debate. For McCain, 33 percent felt he understands voters’ needs before the debate, and 44 percent thought so afterwards.

There is some good news for McCain, who still dominates Obama when it comes to perceptions of readiness to be president. Before the debate, 42 percent thought Obama was prepared for the job, and that percentage rose to 58 percent after the debate. But 77 percent felt McCain was prepared for the job before the debate, and 83 percent thought so afterwards.

FINAL UPDATE: The debate was not that interesting. The format was bad, the selection of questions was mediocre, and Brokaw was a lousy moderator. Jim Lehrer did a much better job of facilitating exchanges between the candidates.

Having watched the whole thing, I can see why the snap polls favored Obama. It’s not that McCain made any big mistake (though referring to Obama as “that one” was not classy), it’s just that his answers were often meandering and less on point than Obama’s.

The debates were not Obama’s best department during the primaries, but he was solid tonight. He briefly summarized his policy proposals well. He seems very comfortable and not easily rattled. He had to go first in answering that somewhat odd final question (What don’t you know and how will you learn it?), and he managed to come up with a decent joke and a segue into comfortable turf for him.

Obama also had some effective responses to McCain, like saying there are some things he doesn’t understand about Iraq, such as why we invaded a country that didn’t attack us when we hadn’t finished the job in Afghanistan.

Many of McCain’s claims about Obama during the debate (Obama voted to raise taxes 94 times, Obama got a $3 million earmark for an overhead projector) were false, according to the CBS Fact Check.

I didn’t hear anything from McCain that seemed likely to do harm to Obama, who has been leading all the latest national polls and many of the key swing state polls. He currently wins according to nearly 90 percent of the 10,000 vote projections at fivethirtyeight.com.