Seems to be an evolving consensus the debate was fairly even, until Iraq came up, and then Obama pulled ahead. Even a group of undecided voters on Fox News thought so!
A whole lotta links here and this from the The New Republic blog:
The debate was tepid, very substantive and saw minimal distinction between Clinton and Obama. Then came Iraq. And it ceased to be close.
Obama made the full-spectrum critique of the Iraq war -- tougher on terrorism than she was, comprehensive in his reappraisal of foreign affairs, vociferous on the need to get out of Iraq and what its implications are...This is his closing argument against Hillary, and then McCain.
And Clinton had... nothing. A tiny incompetence-dodge argument, an obfuscatory pretense that she didn't actually vote for the war, and a refusal to consider the error an error even when predicating her support for leaving Iraq on the fact that the war is filled with... errors. (Not that she was naive for backing the war!) For ten minutes, Hillary Clinton looked like her caricature. By the time Barack Obama started his reminder that the vote Clinton cast in October 2002 was a vote for the war by saying "I don't want to belabor this..." it was like a mercy killing.
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