Josh Worries

Is Obama tough enough? Money quote:

Hillary can be relentless and like a sledgehammer delivering tendentious but probably effective attacks. But whatever you think of those attacks, Obama isn't very good at defending himself. And that's hard for me to ignore when thinking of him as a general election candidate.

On the other hand, Ambers:

Obama spent the first forty minutes of the debate defending policy. On the one hand, the more Obama debates policy, the less he has to argue that he has the substance to match Clinton. On that same hand, the debate was also helpful to Obama in that it gave him a chance to answer a month's worth of charges from his opponents... charges he answered more or less effectively... certainly effective enough to the voter unfamiliar with the ins and outs of policy...

A passel of tough questions were posed, and he seemed to nail just about every one of them.

I fall in between. Obama did great, but he's a cool character, with a wry sense of humor. He's not made for brawling. And sometimes, you've got to brawl in politics. Stylistically, he's a one-off. I like that about him.