Debate Reaction: Reaching for a Knockout

On one level, a person has to hand it to John McCain: He had a much more difficult path to victory in Wednesday’s debate, since he faced so much more difficult a path to changing the dynamic of the larger election. He had to attack Obama without seeming overtly shrill and ugly; he had to lay out a coherent plan on the economy without it sounding like yet another major shift in his own campaign narrative–since there had been so many already. By most of the pundit assessments, Mr. McCain outperformed relative to what most of us have come to expect.

And it wasn’t nearly, nearly enough.

As Obama sat stoically, grinning, sipping water, McCain flexed his eyebrows and gritted his teeth. The “Joe the Plumber” narrative positively wowed the news analysts, but the focus groups hated those references, and, in an unusually telling post-debate moment, Joe The Plumber, himself. was unable to tell Katie Couric on national television who it was he’d decided to vote for. When Obama suggested getting the discussion back onto the issues, McCain decided that was the moment to bring up Bill Ayers, and the dials responded like the altimeters on a crashing airplane.

This was easily the most lopsided debate contest I’ve yet seen, and I’m old enough to have seen most of them. Unfortunately for Mr. McCain, it was a lopsided contest in favor of the Good Guy.