I missed the first few minutes of the debate yesterday on Meet the Press between Republican Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio and his Democratic challenger, Rep. Sherrod Brown. From what I saw, however, I thought DeWine did well and, on balance, got the better of Brown by painting him as part of the "fringe" of the Democratic party, especially on matters of national security.

Frankly, if you take a close look at Sherrod Brown's answers defending some of his votes in the House, they were a mess. First, Brown stumbled when Russert asked what Iraq would look like today if his vote in favor of getting all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the fall of 2006 had passed. That was followed by this particularly brutal exchange:

MR. RUSSERT: Back in October in '03, about six months into the war, you voted against $87 billion to fund the war. Would you consider, if the president does not change the course and you're elected to the U.S. Senate, measures to cut off funding for the war?

REP. BROWN: No, I would not vote against the troops in the field.

MR. RUSSERT: Why did you do that in '03?

REP. BROWN: I voted against the $87 billion because there was a better way to do it.

This appears to be a new twist on John Kerry's famous gaffe from 2004: "I voted against it but now I'd vote for it."

A bit later DeWine tagged Brown on his multiple votes in favor of cutting intelligence spending and against the Patriot Act, leading to this stumble and obvious change of direction:

MR. RUSSERT: All right. I'm going to give him 30 seconds to respond to that, then I want to move to the future.

REP. BROWN: Well, the, the--again, the--on the intelligence, the intelligence...

MR. RUSSERT: But you voted against the Patriot Act?

REP. BROWN: I did vote against the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act had a lot of good things in it, but it, it, it went too far. And it's, it's not--the Patriot Act is law now, but we've not done what we should do in Afghanistan.

In my opinion, Brown lost this debate for the same reason I thought George Allen lost his encounter with Jim Webb a couple of weeks back: Brown seemed the more evasive of the two. When Russert asked him directly what to do if Iraq is indeed a "failed state," Brown stumbled before quickly heading back to his canned talking points about "the status quo."

The one section where I thought Brown did well was when he talked about "fair trade" - the kind of populist rhetoric sure to resonate with voters in economically depressed Ohio. But even that ended badly: Brown went to rebut a DeWine comment about taxes but instead mentioned DeWine's now famous ad with doctored pictures of the WTC and walked right into another hit against his votes on national security:

SEN. DeWINE: Tim, Tim, I, I said there was a mistake made in the picture, but there was no mistake in the facts.

REP. BROWN: This is how he runs ads. They aren't--"It was a mistake. It was a mistake."

SEN. DeWINE: You're still not denying the facts. Are the facts incorrect?

REP. BROWN: But no--just, just like Mike DeWine, it doesn't hold the drug companies accountable, doesn't hold the Defense Department accountable...

SEN. DeWINE: He won't, he won't answer the question, Tim. Ten votes against intelligence, 10 votes against...

REP. BROWN: He didn't even fire--he didn't fire the ad agency.

MR. RUSSERT: Was there anything other than the smokestack--smoke...

REP. BROWN: What was wrong with the ad?

MR. RUSSERT: Was there any factual other mistakes in terms of...(unintelligible).

REP. BROWN: Well, other, other than the smoke--the doctoring a photo?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, you made that point. You made that point.

REP. BROWN: That's a, that's a pretty important point. It just shows that Mike DeWine...

SEN. DeWINE: There he goes.

These debates aren't huge events in and of themselves, but they do provide a look at how the candidates are working the angles against one another. Brown is clearly a formidable challenger and he's making the most of discontent with both Iraq and the economy, as well as the particularly awful environment for Republicans in Ohio. But he does have some serious vulnerabilities on national security issues. If DeWine can effectively exploit those vulnerabilities over the next five weeks - and if Ohioans agree that national security is an issue of primary importance to them in this election - he may be able to pull this race out.