[President Bush's] are the kinds of failures that have to do with judgment. They have to do with vision, the capacity to inspire people. They don’t have to do with whether or not he was managing the bureaucracy properly.

That’s not to deny that there has to be strong management skills in the presidency. It is to say that what has been missing is the ability to bring people together, to mobilize the country, to move us in a better direction, and to be straight with the American people.

Obama's argument was essentially this: knowing how to work the levers of power in Washington is an excellent skill, but it isn't relevant to the president's main purpose, which is to use his or her bully pulpit to inspire large swaths of Americans to come together and support major policy proposals.

It was an interesting debate, and both sides acquitted themselves well.

The other moment that caught my eye/ear was the moment Hillary Clinton seemed to say that she was against the 2001 bankruptcy bill after she was for it.

RUSSERT: Senator Clinton, you voted for the same 2001 bankruptcy bill that Senator Edwards just said he was wrong about. After you did that, the Consumer Federation of America said that your reversal on that bill, voting for it, was the death knell for the opponents of the bill. Do you regret that vote?

CLINTON: Sure I do, but it never became law, as you know. It got tied up. It was a bill that had some things I agreed with and other things I didn’t agree with, and I was happy that it never became law. I opposed the 2005 bill as well.

I don't want to interpret that as another driver's-licenses-for-illegals moment, but I'm having trouble parsing it any other way.