Having just watched an hour of debate between John Kasich and Ted Strickland, I have to admit to being surprised at how close it was. Sure, Strickland didn’t look equal to Kasich, but he didn’t do nearly as badly as a candidate running 12 points behind his opponent (according to SurveyUSA and Rasmussen) should do.

That said, John Kasich clearly won, both because he had to do less to win and because he managed to put Strickland on the defensive throughout the debate. Strickland talked more about his record, mostly eschewed demagoguery and even shook John Kasich’s hand, a moment that drew incredulous laughs from the press pool. It was quite a change from the strange sight of the campaign trail, where the incumbent Strickland has been playing the populist on the warpath against the well-off classes.

In this forum, Strickland looked out of his depth. He said “um” or “you know” so often that anyone playing a drinking game to the utterances would have expired of alcohol poisoning. He served up a few moments of awkward silence. Strickland’s confused, defensive strategy bore out a couple of the points I made in my recent article.

The old theme of class warfare, the centerpiece of the Strickland campaign, did make a few appearances. Strickland’s post-debate press release argued that “You saw Ted being Ted: the son of a steelworker on Duck Run who never forgot where he came from.” Far be it from me to disagree, as Strickland looked exactly like what a steelworker’s son from Duck Run would look like if he were thrust into an executive position during one of the most punishing economic crises in history: ignorant and unpracticed.

Kasich, meanwhile, commanded the debate despite a few embarrassing transitions and a sometimes folksy demeanor that verged on cheesy. He put Strickland on the defensive early with factoid-saturated rebuttals that told a clear narrative of Ohio in decline due to general mismanagement. These were even nonpartisan in their orientation (he cited the Brookings Institution).

In contrast to this researched, confident delivery that swung between personable and wonky, Strickland could only answer with a silly line about how Kasich didn’t like Ohio because he wanted to make it like more economically successful states. At one point, Strickland danced dangerously close to a gaffe when he said that making Ohio like Florida or Nevada didn’t make sense because “Florida has a lot of tourism and Nevada has a lot of gambling.” The interstate hostility, as well as the implied message — that Ohio had no competitive industries of its own and that Strickland was fine with that because he “likes Ohio” — was more devastating than anything Kasich could have said.

Most interesting of all was the fact that neither candidate went as negative as they could. Kasich was so relentlessly upbeat that I wondered if he was going to start belting out “Tomorrow” from Annie. Strickland, while he focused a little more on attacking Kasich’s Wall Street record, offered more constructive solutions than has been typical. This would be a more interesting race if we got a chance to see more of what Strickland did tonight, sans the unsure delivery and occasionally bizarre statement.