With 19 days to go before the election, Obama and McCain faced off for the last time.

The debate format differed in two major respects:

• Bob Schieffer is moderating and while he’s friendly and a bit tenacious, he’s also had a man-crush on McCain for years. Schieffer’s old enough to remember when McCain was McCain.
• The candidates will be sitting. Seriously. This is what the campaigns came up with for the three debates: Podiums, Stools and then Chairs. I imagine a fourth debate would have involved futons.

In the end, I think Schieffer did a good good job of getting the candidates to interact. Either that or it’s finally dawned on McCain that he’s running out of time to change the narrative. I tend to think it was the latter.

At the start of the debate, McCain jotted a number of notes down on his pad – I imagine that these were his checklist of points to hit including Ayers, ACORN, infanticide, “Obama will raise your taxes” and “I’m not Bush.”

McCain unloaded early and ran out of steam quickly. McCain scored a big hit with, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against him, you should have run four years ago. It’s the sort of line McCain should have been repeating for months. It’s a solid line but too little too late.

The rest of the debate seemed to be Obama “wanting” to talk about the economy without really talking about it and McCain rehashing charges that were debunked months ago. McCain dredged up the Clinton “kitchen sink” and managed to throw even more at Obama – all of which from the radical right-wing emails which have circulated for months. I don’t think any of it stuck:

• William Ayers – Obama used the forum to cleanly refute it point by point and interrupted McCain to say it was “completely untrue” that Obama launched his campaign in Ayer’s living room.
• ACORN – A trumped-up non-issue that was just as incomprehensible to the mainstream as it was before. Like McCain’s S&L baggage, it’s too complicated in the age of talking points for it to get traction.
• “Obama’s for tax increases” when, in fact, he’s offering more tax cuts to the middle class than McCain. (I seriously don’t know why McCain hasn’t offered even deeper tax cuts – it’s what W. would have done. The idea of the GOP ceding the tax cut issue to the Dems is stunning.)
• The Illinois “infanticide” inanity – debunked and absurd on it’s face.

McCain also made a big issue of a fellow named Joe the Plumber or Bob the Builder or Sam the Butcher or some such who was McCain’s token small-business victim of Obama’s tax increases for people making more than a quarter million dollars. Seriously – with two wars (three if you count the War on Terror), a $700 billion dollar bailout, and the fears of a 10% unemployment rate in 2009, the Bush tax cut which was a bad idea in the first place and which was supposed to sunset looks like an even worse idea now. I don’t like taxes but McCain was right to oppose these poorly-timed Bush tax cuts in the first place and him attacking Obama on letting them expire shows how far he’s fallen.

All of this on a day the Dow dropped 733 points.

The most surreal moment of perhaps all 49 debates (including Kucinich admitting to seeing UFOs, Mike Gravel proudly discussing his bankruptcy, and Romney deciding that as president, he would talk to his lawyers to see if he can invade Iran) was when McCain literally used air quotes when describing the “health” of the mother as a factor in abortion. Yeeesh. To me, it was the final blow that knocked him out.

The race has been over for a while and McCain is now in Hillary Clinton territory: slinging a lot of dirt, desperate and angry, kicking and screaming. Like Hillary, McCain is sinking so low and squandering so much for a lost cause.

It’s comforting to know that no matter how dirty you fight, no matter how many compromises you make, no matter how much rage you incite in your supporters, and now matter how reckless you are with your choices, you can always go back to the Senate where that stuff is gold.

– Steve

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.