International jihadism must sense this is a moment in which any strike they can muster would have enormous consequences for Western confidence. We can only hope that the blows dealt to al Qaeda in Iraq have crippled its reach for years to come, and that if he wins Obama will be so invested in his Afghanistan-first rhetoric that he will be obliged to fight on that front for as long he is president and to allow General Petraeus control of the strategy.

But that "if he wins" is a real “if,” as the American people are clearly engaged and watching every minute of this drama very closely.  The least consequential story of recent days is Obama's advertising advantage. It isn't an election that will be won on 30 second ads, not when the choice before us is all that anyone talks about when they aren't talking about the sudden shrinking of their retirement accounts.

Everyone wants their money back.  They want growth back.  They don't want to pay soaring taxes, and they don't want to pay $4 a gallon gas.

They don't want the financial estates that the Greatest Generation has accumulated over a lifetime of work to be transferred in bulk into the coffers of the government and not the grandkids.

They like Obama.  I like Obama.  Nearly everybody likes Obama.

But I don't want to put the country through Great Depression 2.0, and I don't want a vast army of academics and social engineers descending on D.C. with plans on how to remake America in their own extremist image.

The race is tight and very fluid. The electorate knows the enormous consequences of the choice before them even as McCain struggles to articulate it because McCain embodies it.  Lefty pundits can't believe how easy he went on Obama last night, and are left with "That one" to chew over as an outrage against their beloved leader.  Conservative pundits wanted McCain to press the choice on the country with much more clarity than he did and to demand of Obama specificity to the agenda they know he is carrying, but McCain only did that on a couple of occasions.  McCain committed no blunders.  All of his answers were correct (though some of the free market people grumble about the mortgage buy-up) and his foreign policy credibility was again on display.  But they wanted a devastating attack because that is what we do all day long -- argue the case.  McCain wasn't arguing the case so much as referring to it.

McCain expects the country to get this.  His 90 minutes was an extended reminder of his seriousness and the seriousness of the job and its difficulties.  His surrogates will continue to hammer the unexplored side of Obama and what it would portend for an Obama Administration when it came to staffing, but McCain is going to keep making the one big point: This is no time for a rookie with big tax hikes, huge tariffs, expanding bureaucracies and a retreat and defeat foreign policy to take the helm.