Triumphant: Ali over Liston. Bettmann-Corbis

In his Senate office, on a wall near his desk, Barack Obama has a framed copy of a famous boxing picture. It is of young Muhammad Ali standing in triumph over the prostrate hulk of the aging Sonny Liston. Ali has just leveled the supposedly fearsome champ. Ali is shouting, exulting in his conquest.

Well, I know Ali a bit--have shaken his mammoth hand, chatted with him and been around him in my second hometown of Louisville. I watched him fight. He liked to say that he floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. It was more like a whole swarm. 

So, I know Ali and senator: you are no Ali.

For whatever reason (I think there are several, personal and strategic), you either don’t know how to or can’t be a closer. You can’t finish with the kind of flurry that drops your foe to the canvas. You didn’t do it to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and, at least Friday night here at Ole Miss, you didn’t do it to Sen. John McCain.

But here’s the question: Is a devastating puncher who we want in a president? Is that who we want in our next president?

Well, maybe not. Maybe we’ve had enough pugnacity for a while. Maybe George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have given pugnacity a bad name. Maybe voters want a more peaceable style. Maybe right now they want an open hand, not another closed fist.

That’s the only reason I can think of why most of my colleagues (and, apparently, judging from the instant polls of viewers) decided that Obama had “won’” the debate here in Oxford.

On debating points--and if campaigns are boxing--McCain won. He was the sneering aggressor. He had Obama backpedaling for much of the night on foreign policy. Obama, for his part, missed several chances to counterattack, especially on the economy. Obama’s answers were strewn with annoying “ums” and “ahs” as he played for time to calibrate the least-damaging response.

Note to colleagues on the White House beat, especially any of you who are (sub-consciously perhaps) cheerleading for Obama: I predict that you are going to come to hate his press conferences; they are going to make you hunger for sound bites.

But maybe: so what? Maybe boxing is the wrong metaphor. Maybe voters are fed up with leaders who start wars without studying the possible consequences. Maybe voters are tired of the kind of presidency that blows off Congress and its critics as unpatriotic. Maybe voters are tired of my-way-or-the-highway thinking. 

Surely, this is Obama’s own calculation. His operative metaphor isn’t boxing, but bodysurfing. He is the product of Hawaii, where they learn to wait for and ride the wave. He thinks he is riding the Big Curl now: a new generation, a new demographic, a new global framework at a time when voters urgently want “change” and Obama, by default, is the only one who plausibly can provide it. 

Maybe that explains why Obama had openings in the debate and didn’t take them. The economy is the best example. Yes, I know: McCain did not use the words “middle class” and he sometimes got lost in beltway jargon about earmarks and “the DOD.”

But Obama could have leveled him. All he had to do was keep mentioning Bush, especially now. Leave it to our callow president to use cringe-inducing frat-house lingo to summarize our dire economic predicament. If there is no bailout of the mortgage-credit markets, he said the other day, “this sucker is going down.”

Obama didn’t mention this. Did he need to bother? I guess not.

He was content, also, to let McCain natter on about all the places he had been and all the world leaders he had met. At one point, McCain noted that no one--even Alexander the Great--had been able to conquer Afghanistan. I half expected the senator to brag about the meeting he had had with Alexander himself. It would have been a funny line.

Obama was secure, if not serene, in the knowledge that the more McCain talked, the more he was talking about the past--and that he, Obama, was by his very being a representative of the future. McCain was winning battles in a war that seems to have ended.

Also, Obama was being graded on a curve. McCain spoke more sharply, bluntly, and, for most of the night, more effectively. But that mattered less than whether there was a “game-changer.” Because there was not, and because Obama is ahead in the polls, you have to ultimately score Ole Miss as a miss for McCain. 

And here in Mississippi, they know something about game changers. It was called the Civil War. More than two thirds of the Mississippi men who went off to fight in it died or were wounded. The numbers from the Battle of Vicksburg alone are stunning: 10,000 dead or injured in one decisive, disastrous battle.

There was no Vicksburg-like wipeout here at the first presidential debate, on the woodsy campus of the University of Mississippi. By that measure, Obama, fighting most of the night on McCain’s turf, did enough not to lose--which means that he did enough to “win.”