During the presidential campaign season, every pundit -- regardless of political affiliation -- has touted the "town hall" format as the strongest and most comfortable debate setting for John McCain. Unfortunately, McCain performed miserably in Tuesday's town hall debate with Barack Obama, once again looking desperate, rambling and uncomfortable. So how is the GOP going spin it?

C&L sources who are on GOP e-mail lists report that at least a half hour before the debate was even finished, they started receiving e-mails spinning and whining about the format and how it wasn't a REAL town hall -- therefore, it's unfair to poor John McCain. Ben Smith at Politico got the ball rolling:

I wrote earlier that this would likely be an empathy contest, but between the odd rules, the candidates, and the visibly displeased moderator, that's not really happening. The questions are basically impersonal, and the questioners then disappear.

Right. It's not the debater who failed....it's the debate format that failed him.

Let's see how many of the right wing water carriers pick up and run with that lame excuse.

During tonight's Presidential Debate Senator John McCain made the claim that he "warned" about the impending economic crisis. That's amazing, seeing as he said in 2007 that he was in fact surprised by it and failed to predict the disaster he, President Bush and the GOP brought upon America. Think Progress has the video and more:

I don’t know of hardly anybody, with the exception of a handful, that said “wait a minute, this thing is getting completely out of hand and is overheating.” So, I’d like to tell you that I did anticipate it, but I have to give you straight talk, I did not.

Obama nails him in tonight's debate:

Obama: Now I've got to correct a little bit of Senator McCain's history, not surprisingly, but let's first of all understand that the biggest problem in this whole process was the deregulation of the financial system. Senator McCain as recently as March bragged about the fact that he is a deregulator. On the other hand two years ago I said we've got a subprime lending crisis that has to be dealt with, I wrote to Secretary Paulson, I wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and told them this is something we have to deal with and nobody did anything about it. A year ago I went to Wall Street and told them we have to re-regulate, and nothing happened.