I watched the entirety of the third debate last night; I doubt that this time another 60 million or so Americans joined me in making it through all 90 minutes.  For sports fans there was competition from both an NFL game and the decisive game of the NLCS, a 9-0 Giants blowout of the Cards.  And the debate itself with both candidates seated and foreign policy as the ostensible topic provided fewer occasions for knockout moments.   The moderator was lowkey and straightforward, and the audience had taken its vow of silence very seriously.

Mitt Romney adopted his moderate posture, opting for appearing statesman-like and not making gaffes rather than going on the offensive.  He abandoned his Libya attack, for example.  President Obama was more aggressive, but Romney refused to rise to the bait.  This tactic, however, left Romney with nowhere particular to go.  He agreed with the President on several issues, stammered many of his answers, and, despite claiming differences with the President on, say, Syria, he didn't enumerate any differences and had no specifics. 

Since we still don't know where Romney really stands on any single issue, domestic or foreign, it's impossible to know whether his posture last night really indicates what he believes.  It is important to remember that Romney's foreign policy advisors in this campaign are all part of the neocon establishment that promoted Bush's foreign policy.  The words "human rights" were spoken a few times last night, but never in any significant way.  The fact that during the campaign Romney criticized Obama for ending "enhanced interrogation" and that his advisors have urged him to restore such techniques went unsaid.  Just as I've been disappointed that any discussion of environmental issues was missing from the first two debates, so too the omission--on both sides--of a substantive argument about human rights was discouraging, though not surprising.

Both candidates tried hard to move the debate towards domestic/economic issues with very tenuous, at least as they were used, segues from how we can't have a strong foreign policy without a strong nation at home.  There was nothing new here (as Bob Schieffer, the moderator, pointed out at one moment), nothing but the same recitation of the same statistics.  Whoever hadn't tuned out before, probably let his or her mind drift when Romney began enumerating his vague five points for an economic turnaround that he had used in the first two debates.

So I don't think this last debate changed many minds, even among the so-called undecideds, though as all my friends keep asking, "Who are these people anyway?"  As Albert Brooks tweeted, they're the ones who can't find their car.  Still, all the pundits and instant polls this morning agree that the President "won" the debate.  In part, it was Romney's lackluster performance, his failure to distinguish himself from current policies, and the tangles his shifting positions have entailed (his response about whether China was a friend or an adversary contradicted itself from sentence to sentence).  But the President also had some zingers (and they seem to count): his response to having fewer ships (we also have fewer horses and bayonets), his "the eighties called and they want their foreign policy back," his remark that his first trip to Israel wasn't for fundraising, among others. 

Obama succeeded too in personalizing the debate in a way that Romney didn't--and didn't respond to.  How many times did Obama mention gender equality and the need for protection of women's rights in Arab countries?  Why didn't Romney respond at all, since he needs to close the gender gap in this key demographic?  (I can speak pundit-talk, too.)  Romney never mentioned veterans; Obama did several times.  Obama talked about his visit to the Holocaust Museum in Israel; Romney stuck to generalities.  Romney didn't make any game-changing gaffes, but he also didn't define himself (can he do this on any issue?) as a potential Commander-in-Chief.  Whatever position Romney is taking at any given moment, he usually comes across as sure of himself.  Last night, he seemed tentative and unsure, and he didn't wear the cloak of moderate very easily. 

Only two more weeks of the campaign that seemingly never ends.  In Kansas, there have been virtually no political advertisements.  We're safely in the Republican electoral column; the governor is not up for re-election, and there are no House candidates that are challenged.  Dennis Yoder, the representative who swam naked in the Sea of Galilee, has no opposition, though at least he had the courage not to sign Grover Norquists's no new taxes of any kind pledge.  I can't imagine what it must be like to live in Iowa or Virginia or especially Ohio.  After all the talk of the role of money and super-PACs in the election, we in Kansas have no real idea of how that is playing out.  The electoral college, which was meant to give slightly increased strength to small states, has decidedly different consequences in reality.  Kansas, like forty or so other states, can be taken for granted.  So for the next two weeks, no presidential candidate will visit; no advertising time or dollars will be taken up with politics.