Maggie Haberman of the New York Post watched last night’s debate with 12 undecided Democrats. The article is headlined “Barack ‘Disappoints’,” although it sounds like pretty much everyone disappointed in one way or another.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton came off as “presidential,” Sen. Barack Obama seemed “timid,” and former Sen. John Edwards got kudos on health care.

Those are some of the impressions that a Post group of 12 undecided Democrats came away with last night after the first debate.

“She knows the issues, she looked presidential, and she held her own,” Jackie Rowe-Adams, a vice president with District Council 37, Local 299, said of Clinton. “And she kept a smile, if you noticed.”

Obama, meanwhile, was “really timid . . . like he was searching [for answers],” she said.

Manhattan nonprofit worker Lisa Ruben, too, was let down.

“[Obama] had the highest expectations coming into this,” she said, “so I was expecting to hear this great speaker.”

Roseann Darche, 62, a city government worker from Queens, described Obama as “the opposite of charismatic.”

“He was on message,” she noted, “and he wasn’t spontaneous.”

[...]

Some eyes rolled during some of Obama’s answers, particularly when he discussed the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on partial-birth abortions, and called the decision one best left between a woman “and her clergy.”

And investment banker Elizabeth Addonizio said, “He’s not answering the question,” during Obama’s response to a query about what defines a complete mission in Iraq.

Later, Addonizio faulted Clinton for “not [making] enough direct eye contact with the camera,” though she found her to be “clear and precise” while Edwards sounded more “like a preacher than a president.”

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson got guffaws around the table nearly every time he appeared on screen - but not as many as former U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel, who had observers hooting and shaking their heads at the same time.

One watcher murmured, “She’s lying,” when Clinton was the only debater not to raise her hand when asked if they had ever kept a gun at home.

Actually, on that last point, there’s little reason to think that Hillary wasn’t telling the truth. Why would she need to keep a gun at home, when “home” for decades now has been either the governor’s mansion in Arkansas, the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or her current home in Chappequa where she has Secret Service protection?

No doubt it makes her wonder why anyone would need to keep a gun at home.

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