Welcome to a special post-presidential debate edition of TBTL here on News Talk 17.

Cairo, I'm Luke Burbank now.

Coming up after the news at 8 o'clock, we'll do our whole little fanciful music and give you our weights and do our normal TBTL introduction, but we thought we'd take a couple of minutes right now to digest what we just saw a very huge event so far in this presidential election, the debate in Oxford, Mississippi, the first of its kind so far in this campaign, and the intrigue was very thick, leading almost right up to it because John McCain

and his campaign earlier this week, he said that he wasn't going to be there, Barack Obama said that he was going to be there and so McCain ended up just today making the announcement that he was actually going to show up for this debate.

We're going to talk to Dave Ross in just a moment of the Dave Ross show.

He's been at home watching the debate very intently as he often does. If you remember, he's been with us after both of the conventions and joins us for all things political.

And what do you know? Speak of the sun and you see its rays. Dave Ross joins us right now. Hi Dave.

Hi Luke, how are you?

I'm great. I just want to get your thoughts on what we just saw straight out of Mississippi.

John McCain, I thought, seemed a little unfocused when he started out. He was talking about Ted Kennedy a little bit and then he just seemed like he was casting about some.

I was wondering, do you think that all this cancelling and uncancelling of his campaign? Was that actually leaving him a little unprepared or distracted?

I don't think so. I think he brought up Ted Kennedy because he wanted to show that he is a sympathetic man reaches across the aisle.

I think it was just sort of a throwaway beginning. I actually was expecting him to be a little more unfocused than he was.

I thought that in most of the answers he came out on the attack. He clearly had an agenda to keep saying again and again, I don't think Barack Obama understands.

I think Mr. Obama is a little naive and he just continued with that refrain to try and point out that he is not just the older man but the wiser man and that Barack Obama is the guy who would have to learn on the job.

Yeah, it felt to me like John McCain took a gravitas pill or something right before the debate. I mean he was really deliberate. He was really paternal. He was almost grandfatherly and really seemingly kind of playing that up.

In some cases I would call it condescending. I mean he boarded on that.

I was wondering do you think that that was because the economy is in such a state of chaos right now and people are feeling very unsteady about their homes and where their next paycheck is coming from potentially.

Is this actually something that maybe helps McCain a little bit and was he playing that up the sort of comforting veteran lawmaker who just wanted to speak without lots of hyperbole but just tell the people it's going to be okay. Grandpa is going to take care of you.

But the sense of what he really wanted to do was turn the focus away from the economy and talk about the war in Iraq and foreign policy.

Because this was supposed to be the foreign policy debate right.

Of course they could but they couldn't ignore the economy but that's in Barack Obama's wheelhouse and he was trying to make the point that if you're going to bail out the millionaires you have to also pay some attention to the average school teacher and the firefighter and the policeman

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