I got two text alerts today from the Obama campaign. The first told me to "watch Barack debate John McCain on CNN" and then the second one offered a slight correction: "Watch Barack debate John McCain tonight on any of the major networks or cable." Umm, good save?

I'm personally watching CNN at the moment. They have a focus group whose reactions we'll be getting in real time. 97% of their focus group thinks the country is going in the wrong direction and 70% think Barack is going to win the debate.

Any thoughts before we get going?

Update [2008-9-26 20:49:0 by Josh Orton]: While you're killing time:

• Tonight's format sounds exciting:
  

  The debate, he said, will be split into nine nine-minute segments. The first four minutes of each will be taken up with a question to each of the candidates; the remaining five minutes will take different forms, up to the moderator, Jim Lehrer's discretion, and one of those options is to let the candidates address one another and interact on the subject in question.

  Might be time for them to mix it up.

• And while we're setting expectations:

Update [2008-9-26 21:0:4 by Todd Beeton]:Jeffrey Toobin just questionined the very premise of the expectations game, saying it gives the talking heads in the media way too much power. Watch out Jeffrey, they're going to revoke your pundit license. The fact is that having the expectation that Obama will outperform McCain is absurd, considering his less than stellar debate performances early in the primary and then during the two forums where he "shared the stage" with John McCain. But as agile as the Obama campaign has proven to be, I'm pretty confident that Obama will adjust. I think what those expectations do reflect is the manner in which McCain and Obama have conducted themselves over the past few weeks. If your only experience of these two candidates was since September 1, yeah, you're probably gonna think Obama has it.