News of the day

Despite John McCain's best attempts to judo flip America into a weird conversation about this guy, the news today is still the financial crisis. When something's dominated the cycle for this long, it's obviously a deal. I'm pretty sure we've moved well beyond shark-attack-and-missing-intern-ville by now, and are getting close to 9-11-and-shock-and-awe territory, with no signs of slowing.

That said, a few predictions for the debate tonight. Recall the rules: I'm 0-for-2 this season, and was probably something like 0-for-bajillion during the primaries, so you're best advised to believe the opposite of what I write here. But!

Barring an ill-timed sigh or the unfortunate use of the word "whitey", I think that this debate has the real potential to end the McCain campaign once and for all. Why? Well, I think the last debate accomplished a couple things things. First, and perhaps most importantly, it established Obama's competence. Progressives have been fairrrrly happy with Obama's foreign policy ideas for some time now, but for most of the mainstream media, age and war experience equals unimpeachable foreign policy credentials, and John McCain has an awful lot of both. So the chips were stacked in his favor and in that odd context, Obama's performance was reassuring.

Within a few days, though, people (bloggers, mostly) began to notice that, notwithstanding his repeated insistence that Senator Obama doesn't understand the world around him, McCain's performance was actually fairly error ridden. And when combined with his campaign's continuing war on the press, I think this really created a hunger to see McCain fall flat on his face. So now that we're getting into territory that makes McCain extremely uncomfortable, I expect both the moderator and Obama himself to spend the whole debate trying to lure McCain into an Iowa-like moment of befuddlement and irascibility.

What's more, I think there's a good chance that one of them will succeed. But we'll see.

For his part, McCain will do whatever he can to change the topic to things like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. But, as Marc Ambinder has already pointed out, when the nation conversation is about Wall Street, health care, and energy, those are a couple of very awkward pivots.

Which is all a long way of saying, I predict an uncomfortable, and at times brutal, debate tonight.