I did it. Heaven help me, I did it. I watched the entire first presidential debate, from beginning to end.
I took only a few notes as I watched. But you can watch it yourself here or read a transcript here, and of course there will be multitudes offering to tell you what the candidates said and what it means and what you should think. There are already lots of fact-checkers too, and if I ever see one who appears nonpartisan, I’ll let you know.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t have time for the pregame chatter over the past few days, and I wasn’t interested in all the immediate postmortems, where everyone tries to spin the thing as if it were exactly what they wanted it to be.
Within minutes of the end, people were asking me who won the debate. I’ll answer that in a moment, but it’s not that simple.