No Game Changer

Well, Andrew Sullivan and the guys at 538 seem to disagree:.

Sullivan concludes:

10.33 pm. This was, I think, a mauling: a devastating and possibly electorally fatal debate for McCain. Even on Russia, he sounded a little out of it. I've watched a lot of debates and participated in many. I love debate and was trained as a boy in the British system to be a debater. I debated dozens of times at Oxofrd. All I can say is that, simply on terms of substance, clarity, empathy, style and authority, this has not just been an Obama victory. It has been a wipe-out.It has been about as big a wipe-out as I can remember in a presidential debate. It reminds me of the 1992 Clinton-Perot-Bush debate. I don't really see how the McCain campaign survives this.

And Nate Silver:

9:31 PM. [Nate] Well, Sean, since you broke the seal, I guess I'll just say that I think this was a clear win for Obama -- much clearer than Round 1 -- and that I expect the polls and focus groups will reflect it. Again, it's all about tone and body language ... if you read a transcript of the debate, it might be a tie.

The dial testing and post-debate polling seems to lean toward a clear Obama victory, but I still think there was no game-changing moment.

The moment that stood out most to me was the "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" turnabout on the Teddy Roosevelt nonsense. But that may just because I was so shocked to hear McCain try that argument. It seems obvious that McCain's "speak softly" rhetoric was not at all aligned with his behavior over the past year -- at best it applied narrowly to his stance on Pakistan.

But I think "that one" is the moment everyone will be talking about.