"There was no knockout, and maybe no knockdown, but McCain was on the offensive throughout," commentator William Kristol said on Fox News Channel.
His fellow panelist, Juan Williams, quickly retorted, "I thought Barack Obama put John McCain on the defensive all night."
David Gergen, CNN analyst, said, "McCain needed a clear victory tonight and I think that eluded him."
Said Fox's Chris Wallace, "I think the McCain campaign is very happy tonight."
And they weren't even the professional spinners, who try to buttonhole reporters backstage with opinions about as predictable as the sun rising every morning. It has become a cliche of debate nights, a room television networks know they should avoid but can't seem to help themselves.
Another useless TV trick: those meters that can be twisted up or down to show how a voter is responding to a particular passage. Mostly, they looked indecipherable.
Obama's campaign put forward vice presidential candidate Joe Biden for post-debate interviews, and he appeared on all the news networks. His Republican counterpart, Sarah Palin, was nowhere in sight.
Several commentators noted how Obama said at a number of points that McCain was right about something, which could either be construed as a sign of weakness or one in which he was willing to lead in a bipartisan manner. McCain pounded home the point that there were several things his opponent didn't understand about the world.
"McCain very often seemed like he was condescending, seeming like he was lecturing Barack Obama," CNN's Gloria Borger said.
The first debate, which was supposed to be centered on foreign policy, concerned the economy for about 40 minutes. Moderator Jim Lehrer of PBC kept his questions simple to get the men talking. He even tried to push the candidates to address each other instead of the camera, a request that had some success as more heated foreign policy exchanges came.
Snapshot polls by both CNN and CBS News showed Obama with a clear advantage among voters in how people perceived the debate performance. CBS monitored a roomful of uncommitted voters and when asked who won the debate shortly after it was done, the number of people who raised their hands for Obama was more than double than those for McCain.
