Comment 1)
I was disappointed with both candidate's performances. I thought they both did a poor job of directly addressing the audience's questions (thought Brokaw sucked too).
The difficulty was illustrated by Obama's snafu from that debate way back when, where a YouTuber's question led to Obama agreeing to meet with Iran's president without precondition. What got lost in that whole debate was the fact that the questioner prefaced the question by say "If it will help improve the situation (would you met them)". To which Obama succinctly and directly answered YES. But what ended up getting lost was all the obvious caveats and "whereas" clauses that would be needed to make clear when a meeting would actually improve the situation.
In Obama's attempt to answer the question directly, he missed restating a lot of the obvious qualifications that were implied in the question.

Fast forward to tonight's debate, and we see two candidates that are terrified of getting caught in the same situation. But rather than adding qualifications and giving cautious but direct answers to people's questions, they retreated to their tried and true talking points.
I chalked it up to a casualty of our gotcha politics, but not the Couric interview kind.

Comment 2)
I almost thought McCain was going to get out in front of Obama on the economy and lead, with his new mortgage bail out proposal. Which had the potential to leave Obama in the dust. It was a concrete idea that could actually help people. But instead McCain decided only to mention it in passing and so it simply became a footnote in the debate.

Comment 3)
On style and overall on substance I thought Obama simply out performed McCain. On substance, I thought Obama actually gave a pretty decent pitch for his health care plan where McCain had none.
And on style McCain just didn't have the needed flare. He just seemed to old at times, frustrated at times - it was not a horrible performance but just wasn't that great.