Watching the debate tonight and listening to viewer’s reactions all confirm that John McCain seemed on a roll for the first part of the debate and then lost it when he went over the top with personal attacks.

Perhaps even more devastating were the reaction shots of McCain as the debate wore on. At times he looked like a bully who enjoyed picking on people; at other times he looked like an angry old man lecturing a child. What he did not look like was Presidential.

About halfway through the debate I turned to my wife and said, “Why isn’t Obama hitting back harder?” I kept waiting for him to call McCain out on his sometimes McCarthy-sounding charges and his attempts to distort Obama’s record.

The most frustrating moment came during McCain’s bringing up the John Lewis comments. Obama rightly brought up the conduct of McCain’s crowds which had provoked John Lewis. At that point had that been me I would have lit into McCain and told him it was time to stop the crap, but Obama held his tongue.

Then McCain started getting nastier. It was like one of those schoolyard provocations where the bully, trying to provoke a fight, gets more and more nasty and violent. In a schoolyard you might say it’s time to fight back, but this was not a schoolyard, it was a national Presidential debate.

The key moment for me–and it seemed also for the sample CNN audience–came when McCain butted in with with the following reply:

Yes, real quick. Mr. Ayers, I don’t care about an old washed-up terrorist.

The tone of McCain’s voice and the look on his face were as much contempt as I have seen from one candidate for another in a Presidential debate. Clearly, McCain did care about Ayers and the line “washed-up old terrorist” sounded like something a drunk might say in bar when an argument was getting especially feisty.

The answer condemned McCain on two accounts. First, it is clear the use of the Ayers strategy and ads in the McCain campaign come from highest levels. This isn’t just your usual negative politics where you put out stuff you don’t really believe or care about as a strategic rather than an ideological or personal decision.

Based on that remark, McCain himself believes that Obama consorted with a terrorist and quite visibly hates him for it. Here we are way off into the realm of psychology, but that this should be a hot-button issue for McCain in that McCain believes Obama was close to Ayers suggests he has still to let go of his Vietnam experiences.

The shift in the debate exemplified by McCain’s comments about Ayers–whom he mentioned almost as much as Joe the Plumber–was also helped by a shift in issues, especially to the Vice Presidency, abortion and education.  All these are areas where McCain enjoys little support. Even then McCain could not resist getting a nasty dig in at Joe Biden or one about the DC schools. By then it was clear he was running on pure anger.

As McCain went negative and his contempt for Obama became more and more visible, that little meter they show on CNN began to register the change. Later an interview with a sample audience showed similar reactions.

Clearly both candidates made somewhat risky and calculated decisions on debate strategy.  McCain made a decision to go after Obama, to keep needling him to try to provoke a reaction or to show he was weak. He also made a decision to hang an entire debate around Joe the Plumber and the Ayers controversy. The latter was a strange choice given that polls have been showing most people are either turned off by Ayers or don’t care. But McCain does.

On the Obama side they had been alerted ahead of time McCain was going to go after them. Clearly they must have had strategy discussions about how they were going to deal with that.  Would they “fight back” and if so how? What they chose to do was to fight back, but not with emotion or personal attacks but with facts.

The more Obama stuck to this strategy, the more McCain seemed to lose control and look like a bully trying to pick a fight. The more Obama stuck to his strategy, the more McCain seemed to make visible his contempt. As he gave in to his anger–CNN analyst David Gergen referred to it as a classic “anger management” situation–the more he moved away from the points about taxes and spending that he made during the first part of the debate.

His handlers must have been wringing their hands at this point because clearly their candidate had wandered far off message. The loose cannon had again asserted itself, only like one of those silent film gags it had blown up in McCain’s face.

My theory writing immediately after the debate is that the Obama people decided that their strategy would be to provoke McCain. They set a trap for him and it worked. But the trap depended on Obama’s ability to stick to his message and let McCain dig himself in.

The gambles each campaign made were that they would make their opponent look less Presidential. McCain wanted to make Obama look like a wimp who could not stand up to tough questioning. He failed. Obama wanted to show that McCain was a loose cannon whose anger would build with frustration.

In the end it was McCain who made you wonder what type of President he will be.

Coda

If I hear one more time about Joe the Plumber, I am going to stuff that person down the plumbing.

Also just saw a CNN poll that two thirds of the people don’t want any more debates. That should be no surprise because these are not debates. It seems obvious that this TV debate format is wearing thin and I would not be surprised to see substantial changes in the formats for the next election.

Tagged with: abortion • audience • bully • cnn • contempt • education • Joe Biden • John Lewis • john mccain • loose cannon • McCarthy • media • metaphor • opponent • personal attacks • plumber • president • Presidential • presidential debate • provocations • reaction shots • schoolyard • trap • vice presidency