Over. And Out.

John McCain is finished. While he and Sarah Palin will put on the brave face and put up as good a fight as they can muster for the next three weeks, they will fall short. My guess is far shorter than the press will admit.

To use a football analogy: Barack Obama has first and ten with less than two minutes to go in the game. McCain has no time outs left. Obama can take three straight knees and the clock will run out.

Also we found out tonight that the Republican National Committee has pulled up stakes in Wisconsin (Obama 54-37 Quinnipiac) and Maine. McCain's starting to look like Giuliani did focusing all his attention on winning Florida. How'd that work, Rudy?

Here are the instant poll results on the final debate:

CNN
Obama 58%
McCain 31%

On who was more likeable, Obama won 70%-22%. Likeability wins elections, you know.

CBS
Obama 53%
McCain 22%
Draw 24% (McCain lost to the draw!)

Fox News
At a Miami-based staged focus group, nearly all the participants felt Obama won. Said Frank Luntz, who hosted the group, "None had made a decision to support Sen. Obama before the debate, but more than half supported him after the debate. It was a good night for Barack Obama."

I actually thought at first -- like I usually do -- that McCain came out stronger, more forcefully, and took the issues right to Senator Obama. Obama sounded a bit tentative, but at least he wasn't losing points, and he was doing an effective job of saying what he needed to say. McCain then had his sound byte of the evening, proclaiming that he wasn't President Bush. Obama's retort -- saying that he was sorry for confusing the two, but on the issues important to most Americans, McCain's exactly like Bush -- turned the tide for me. For the rest of the evening, McCain looked and sounded at turns angry, exasperated, and incredulous. A few times he looked like he'd explode out of his seat. I imagined how things would go for a President McCain if he were seated at a conference table with an adversarial world leader: "If you think I'm talking tough now, my friend, wait till the goddamn bombs rain down on your pointy little head."

Then, for me, the moment when Obama won the presidency. In response to McCain's challenge that Obama come clean on the "fine" business owners would pay under Obama's healthcare plan, Obama looked straight into the camera and said, "Here's your fine: Zero," making a zero with his thumb and forefinger. McCain: "Zero?" Obama: "Zero." Then, according to JumpyPants at Cesca's website, came eleven seconds of McCain with a "blinking, dumbstruck, carp in the headlights look" on his face. Money quote from that story:

McCain has wanted to be president for one overwhelming reason: to be better than his old man and his grandpa -- and by better, of course, I mean more powerful. The only way for a failed, jet-crashing pilot like him to do that, someone who slummed his way to power sideways, through politics, through marrying a rich heiress to fund his campaign, the only way for him to be more powerful is to be Commander in Chief. That's a bigger, bossier, nuclear-codesier holding gig than either of those bastards. And he's never going to have the job. And in those ELEVEN SECONDS, he saw that.

Instead, the job is going to go to That One.

The only day that I will be prouder to be an American than I am right now will be on Nov. 4, 2008 when I get to vote for Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States.