is the BIG debate? hype, hope, or hysterics

From the media's perspective-- given their fawning admiration for Obama-- this debate will be the biggie, if Obama is perceived (or they can sell him) as the winner.

A useful overview of tonight's festivities from the WP's David Broder (hat tip: C-J)...

Friday evening in Oxford, Miss., Barack Obama and John McCain will meet in the first presidential debate of 2008, and this dramatic campaign will in all likelihood reach another turning point.

The match-up could have come much earlier, but Obama turned down McCain's invitation to join in a series of joint town hall meetings during the summer. That would have allowed both men to ease into personal confrontation with relatively small audiences and similarly modest stakes.

Now, they meet with terribly high expectations and little room for error. McCain, after enjoying a brief boost from the Republican convention and the unveiling of Sarah Palin, has fallen back to his pre-convention position, lagging slightly. Obama still is unable to lock down 270 electoral votes, because he is falling short of the lead Democrats enjoy generically over the Republican opposition this year.

Obama is known for his eloquence, while McCain often struggles even when given a decent script. That creates an expectation that the Democrat ought to dominate when the two men are directly compared.

But when I discussed the coming debate with one of the Democrats' most experienced debate handlers — a man who helped prepare Hillary Clinton for the primary debates and now advises Obama — he said, "No matter what others say, I think this is a very even match-up."

McCain, he said, has developed a knack for answering questions with flat, simple declarative sentences, conveying a sense of candor and strength. Obama often starts slowly and finishes with a more complex answer. That made McCain the clear winner in back-to-back sessions with Pastor Rick Warren.

When I bounced these comments off a Republican counterpart to the man just quoted, he was derisive. "That's spin," he said. "McCain has lots of strengths, but verbally, he's not in the same league as Obama. This will be a severe test for him."

Looking back at the performance of the two men during their primary debates, the proposition that they are evenly matched looks quite plausible.

McCain began his revival last year with a strong performance in a Republican debate in New Hampshire. Throughout the spring, he was usually at least the second-best man on the stage, outdone by the folksy and humorous Mike Huckabee but clearly more comfortable and assertive than Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani and the others.

Except for Romney, McCain was rarely directly challenged in the way that Obama will test him; the other Republicans paid tribute to his character and treated him with kid gloves. So his struggles to maintain his composure and avoid personal attacks on Romney suggest a potential vulnerability in the Arizona senator. When Obama bluntly questions McCain's positions, the Arizona senator may have difficulty staying cool.

Yet Obama did not win the Democratic nomination by dominating debates. In the early ones, when the stage was full, he lacked the verbal or physical tools to stand out from the crowd. Hillary Clinton or John Edwards generally made the strongest impressions on the cameras and the audience. And when Clinton and Obama met one-on-one, she won most of the confrontations and the subsequent primaries....

To win the election — and not just this debate — McCain must somehow convince voters that he would be fundamentally different from George Bush, whose policies and methods have been overwhelmingly rejected.

To win the election — and not just the debate — Obama must show enough of himself that voters come to believe that despite not being able to identify with aspects of his exotic life story, they can trust him to look out for their interests as president.

Those are very different challenges. Neither candidate has an easy task. That is what makes this debate so intriguing.