As yet another Obama supporter, I had mixed reactions to the debate.  I tend to agree with the general talking-head consensus that Hillary Clinton won the debate on points, but it was far from the type of decisive victory she probably needed to turn the nomination race around.

There were good moments for both.  They handled the question about Cuba relatively well, although it's somewhat disappointing that Obama may have backed off from a 2003 endorsement of normalization of relations.  I understand why neither candidate wants to say the "n" word with regard to Cuba, because doing so would almost certainly cost them Florida in November.  But that's a race the Democrats probably aren't going to win this year anyway, so I wonder if the political costs are really that high?

Clinton's worst moment was her attempt midway through the debate to aggressively attack Obama.  His responses were very effective in turning those attacks back on her, and she wisely (IMHO) sidestepped several other opportunities where she could have tried to get nasty.  I don't understand why elements within the Clinton campaign apparently believe going negative is going to get them anywhere.  Clinton's best moments come when she has a chance to dig into the nuts and bolts of policymaking, but when she tries to attack she comes off as either phony or just plain spiteful.  Last night reinforced my opinon that Mark Penn is an idiot who has done more than any single individual not named "Barack Obama" to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic nomination.  Her closing response was one of her finest moments, and it's just mind-boggling that this side of her only seems to come out when she's staring into the political abyss.

Obama was clearly taking great pains to address the criticism that he lacks substance.  He jumped on every opportunity to inject the much-demanded "specifics" into his responses, and demonstrated that if he lags behind Clinton in terms of "wonkishness," the gap separating them is not particularly wide.  Indeed, at times I think he overdid it a little in this regard, turning to discussions of policy in response to (somewhat silly) unrelated questions.  If there is one improvement I'd like to see him make in terms of debating performance if he becomes the nominess in the general election, it would be learning that there are times when at thirty-second answer is better than a two-minute answer.

Example:  Clinton effectively defused the question about superdelegates directed to her by one of the panelists (I forget which one), saying something to the effect that the situation "will work itself out."  This was a good answer, and Obama should have just agreed and let it go.  Instead, he repeated his campaign's talking pont about how important it is that the superdelegates' votes reflect the will of the voters.

I think it was a tactical mistake for his campaign to have ever taken this line in the first place (one of the few mistakes they've made, but a mistake nonetheless).  This was a point the Obama campaign didn't need to make--not because it's an invalid argument, but because there were plenty of other people who would've raised the same point, whether they'd done so or not.  Keeping quiet on the issue would've kept the campaign's hands clean.

Had they kept quiet, Clinton's surrogates wouldn't have had a ready-made response to charges that their own activities (lobbying for the seating of the Florida and Michigan delegates, whining that caucuses are "undemocratic") represented an attempt to "change the rules in the middle of the game."

In the end, the debate made me feel better about both candidates.  Obama demonstrated that he's far from an empty suit, and that he is knowledgeble enough on the major issues of the day to be an effective president.  Clinton again showed that she does have a human side, and reassured me that she recognizes that there are significant problems with U.S. politics as presently constructed, and may be willing to take significant steps to address them.  Whichever one of them wins the nomination will have my vote in November.