Senator McCain certainly came out swinging last night. Even knowing that his recent wallowing in negativity did nothing to halt, and perhaps even aided, a dramatic rise in the polls for Senator Obama, McCain still attempted to bombard Obama with every smear he could think of. McCain breathlessly invoked Obama's so-called shadowy associations with William Ayers and ACORN just to have Sentor Obama bat away each charge like so many pesky mosquitoes. I was shocked, frankly, that McCain didn't trot out Reverend Jeremiah Wright's name just one last time.
The tattered Republican playbook tactic of turning a phrase or a name into something nefarious sounding- see "liberal", "George Soros", "ACLU" et al.- by simply repeating it over and over on Sean Hannity's show and in 527 ads, finally seems to have fallen on deaf ears during this election cycle. Could it be that Americans have wised up to the tactic? I doubt it. The ineffectiveness of the tactic this time around is more likely the result of the Democrats actually putting up an extremely strong and well-financed candidate for a change. And, more importantly, the Republicans put up a candidate who can't hide from his long, long history of being a free market ideologue and for having constantly pushing for deregulation. McCain would have been a flawed candidate- too angry, too inconsistent, too old- regardless of when he was running for president but it's particularly hard for him to resonate with voters with a crashing economy and an extremely unpopular Republican president casting a long, dark shadow over his campaign.
In short, I thought Obama dominated the debate. He remained calm and carefully and thoughtfully addressed every bit of random, scatter shot nonsense hurled at him by McCain. Senator McCain seemed to have decided that going negative was his only option left at this point. The result of doing so was simply to make McCain seem unpleasant and small and extremely unpresidential. Given Obama's current lead in the polls, McCain needed to crush him in this final debate; He failed miserably in his attempt to do so. In fact, I thought it was by far McCain's worst debate performance of the three.
Surely, everyone saw the same thing I saw last night. Right? Of course not! Just as with the first two debates, the reaction was all over the spectrum. Behold:
Dick Morris: Debate May be turning point for McCain
Quin Hillyer: Solid Win for McCain
Marc Ambinder: McCain surrenders debate to his frustrations
Taegan Goddard: McCain's best debate
Although opinions did vary, this time around the overwhelming majority of coverage seemed to believe that either Obama won or McCain won, but that it wasn't a big enough victory for him to stem the losing tide of his campaign.
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