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Even before Friday night’s presidential debate began, Republican Sen. John McCain lost points with Florida Democrat O. George Paugh. As congressional negotiators holed up trying to agree on the bailout of the financial industry, McCain had said he wouldn’t attend the debate at the University of Mississippi if a deal hadn’t been reached.

“We’ve got a serious problem here, and I think he was playing politics with it,” says Paugh, 70, a retired federal auditor from Orange Park, Fla., near Jacksonville.

Paugh describes himself as “pretty much a middle of the roader” on politics who tends to be more liberal on social issues and more conservative on military issues. He retired as an Air Force master sergeant after 20 years and a stint in Vietnam, and said his military friends all are planning to vote for Vietnam POW McCain.

“I respect him for what he did in the military. But we’ve got to choose a president, not a military man,” he says.

After the debate, Paugh called McCain “much the stronger on national security,” but he disagreed with the Arizona senator on many issues. Where McCain said sitting down with North Korean and Irani leaders was a bad idea, Paugh said he sided with Obama about keeping that option open. “We should sit down and talk to leaders before we go to war with them,” Paugh says. “I don’t want to go to war. Anyone who’s been there doesn’t want to go.”

One of the things Paugh was watching for was whether Obama was up to the job of being commander in chief of the nation’s military. “To some extent I’m still concerned,” he says, though he liked Obama’s focus on the American presence in Afghanistan and the fact that he would not precipitously pull out of Iraq. “He gave me some confidence I didn’t have before.”

Paugh also liked Obama’s comments on the need to shore up America’s standing with other nations, especially with terrorism still a threat. “We need the rest of the world to be safer after 9/ll,” he says, noting disappointment with Republican-led foreign policy. “Our relations with other countries have really gone to pot because of our cowboy diplomacy.”

Paugh gave Obama better marks for the portion of the debate that focused on the economy. He also preferred Obama’s priority on energy–allowing drilling but pushing for alternative energy sources.

The focus on the financial industry’s failings brought back Paugh’s memories of something he hadn’t thought of for some time–McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five ethics scandal. In 1989 McCain and four other senators were accused of corruption after helping Charles H. Keating Jr., head of a failing savings and loan, with federal regulators. McCain was deemed by the Senate Ethics Committee to have exercised poor judgment.

That memory leads Paugh to think Obama might do a better job cleaning up the nation’s economic mess—“if anyone can,” he says. “We may need Superman.”