One Stop Debate Shopping

If, like me, you are interested in seeing where the chips fell across the blogosphere regarding last night's veep debate, just click here. Joe Gandelman, as usual, has given his own detailed analysis of the event, followed by links and excerpts from dozens of blogs across the political spectrum. With all of the voices being aired, it gets rather long but well worth the read, with links to all of the pundits who are commenting.

I was not surprised to see that a majority had that same opinion as I. The debate was, for all intents and purposes, a tie. Some gave a slight edge to Cheney, myself included, and others gave the nod to Edwards by a nose. Predictably, there were a few hard core partisans who claimed that one man or the other had "wiped the floor" with their opponent, but not many. This debate was as close to a draw as you could get. Both men stayed on message and intent on their goal for the entire ninety minutes. Cheney kept his composure solidly under a series of brutal attacks by Edwards who, for his part, demonstrated a cool, calm demeanor under similar pressure.

Edit: Political Wire has some other good links for debate analysis. Taegan Goddard calls the debate for Edwards, where I saw it going slightly Cheney's way.

Edit #2: Mr. Left also disagrees with me and gives Edwards an overwhelming win in the debate. An excerpt from his analysis:

Cheney attacks Edwards "US suffers 90% of the casualties because you couldn't build a coalition" with a statistic that "50% of the casualties are Iraqi". NOW he's counting the Iraqi dead? That's awfuly conveniant.

So why did Edwards win? Because Cheney can't help himself from lying. On foreign affairs, he exposed his distain for the American people, insisting that he didn't link Iraq to 9/11. He did. Nonstop. For 3 years. We've all heard it again and again. And he disrespects all of us by assuming we'll forget it tonight because its politically convenient for him to abandon his long-held position.