Watching a political debate is like watching the playoffs when your favorite baseball team is playing. Its the whole ball of wax. The debate can make or break a candidate, and a bad play can send the team packing for the winter. You watch both with a knot in your stomach, waiting for disaster. This is why post-debate analysis is useless. You see what you want to see, and unless your candidate takes a dump on stage, he's the winner.

Friday night's debate was a good one. Neither candidate is a idiot. This is a sharp break from the past. The 2000 and 2004 presidential debates were notable for George W. Bush's lightweight responses to serious questions. McCain is no Bush, but the debates suffer from the same flaw every election cycle: the candidates are pandering to the lowest common denominator.

By now, any voter who does not have a favorite candidate is a sorry spectacle. It's too late in the game to be an undecided voter. What does it take to know the difference between the candidates? This is why the candidates, during the debates, repeatedly say something like this: "and this is where we have a fundamental disagreement." The candidates have to slam the undecideds over the head with crap like this.

The debates will never allow the candidates to reveal what they truly think. That would alienate the wobbly supporters who switch sides every other week. It would also get the candidates in a hole that they cannot get out of, as serious answers about the horrible state of the country can never be fully explained during a debate, and the viewers will be too confused to understand what is going on.

An example of this is the discussion about the Iraq war. Obama scored points when he talked about the outrageous financial cost of the war (hundreds of billions of dollars) at a time when the U.S. economy is melting down and the government has to spend roughly the same amount of money to bail out the failed financial institutions. McCain responds with a message that most people want to hear: we are winning the Iraq war and that victory will keep us safe. This puts Obama on the defensive, as no one wants to lose the war and therefore we have to keep throwing money away in Iraq to prevent a backslide.

Obama did tell McCain that McCain was wrong to support the war when it started and that Obama knew better than to join in Bush's folly. But Obama cannot go any further without being labeled an anti-American war loser. That is a shame, because then McCain can talk about the joys of victory, reminding us that he fought in Vietnam, when the U.S. lost, and how horrible it was to return to the U.S. as a war loser. The problem is obvious. People like McCain are re-fighting the Vietnam war. There is nothing worse than losing a war, as far as these war-mongers are concerned. Losing a war is death. It's that macho view towards war that places the pro-war side on the offensive during any debate.

Obama could respond by saying that McCain has a pro-war mentality and that a McCain victory will mean more wars that kill more Americans and cost hundreds of billions of additional American dollars. But he can't say this, because the knee-jerk and macho pro-war view will resonate with the undecideds.

Here is what I would love to hear from Obama, though I know he will never do it, for the reasons outlined above:

"Senator McCain is no different from Bush. He wanted war in Iraq and stood by an incompetent president for years. Senator McCain says now that we have to stay in Iraq in order to protect American security. In other words, after fouling up American foreign policy and creating a risk to our country that did not exist prior to the Iraq war, we have to risk more lives and 10 billion dollars a month for the foreseable future to get us out of a mess that we never should have entered into, like a drug addict who owes the violent loan shark money in order to feed his drug habit. Ladies and gentlemen, Senator McCain may not want people to remember that he is a Republican, but he and Bush are joined at the hip. The Republicans should be severely punished for what they did in Iraq, and for the burdens that this war is causing this counry. If you want four more years of this nonsense, vote for McCain. If not, vote for me."