KEY POINTS:
NEW YORK - If you had been John McCain during yesterday's debate in Nashville you may well have been seized by the desire at least once, if not several times, to walk over and slap your opponent, Barack Obama.
The way he sat so composed on that stool
with that easy half-smile while you were talking was just so aggravating.
Mr McCain did nothing of the sort of course, although he unleashed the verbal equivalent of mild physical violence when he found himself unable to articulate the senator's name, calling him, "That one", instead.
He fairly spat out the words.
Senator Cool was just that.
As in the first debate, Mr Obama gazed intently at Mr McCain whenever the Republican was speaking (albeit with that mild look of amusement) and did not allow a quaver to intervene between each question from the moderator, Tom Brokaw, and his starting to answer it.
For some voters, the cool may still have come across as chilly.
Only when Mr Obama began recalling how his mother, at just 53 years, was reduced to haggling with her insurance companies as she was dying from cancer did he betray emotion that seemed even slightly spontaneous.
If you could see all of Mr Obama in Nashville - tall and languid as he is - it was still tough to see his heart.
But languid is surely better than tottering.
This was the debate n the second of three n that was meant to favour Mr McCain because town hall meetings have been a signature of his campaign, or until recently at any rate.
He was partly tripped by the higher expectations that had been set for him, but also by his advancing years and his clenched-teeth demeanour.
It may be ageist, but the fact that Mr McCain seemed his 72 years was possibly more important than any of the words.
Voters who might have not been familiar with the stiffness that comes from his injuries as a prisoner of war may have been startled.
Don't forget the 1960 race and the 5 o'clock shadow on Richard Nixon that some say cost him that year's contest with John F Kennedy.
Tina Brown, blogging on her new internet page, "The Daily Beast", called it "the cruel physicality of the screen".
Ms Brown, the former magazine editor, spoke of "a tall lithe young senator primed for the terrors of the future, against a stiff, hunched old guy hobbling around the stage in a body held together by an act of will."
It is even possible some viewers felt sorry for Mr McCain.
Sorry for a man who couldn't stop fidgeting when his opponent spoke, like a cocktail guest not sure if anyone at the party liked him.
- INDEPENDENT
