Round Three

“This really gets down to the fundamental difference in our philosophies,” John McCain said, quite accurately, in the heat of the third presidential debate. “If you notice … Senator Obama wants government to do the job. He wants government to do the job. I want you, Joe, to do the job,” referring to a plumber Barack Obama had met on the campaign trail. The job, in this case, was finding health insurance. And in years past, McCain would have had the better of this argument–it is the classic division between liberals and conservatives. But 2008 has proved to be a new and frightening moment for the American electorate, and having the government help in finding, and funding, health care doesn’t sound like such a bad idea anymore. McCain had a feisty debate, with some high points and a bit too much anger to make Americans feel very comfortable in his presence, but to a very great extent, his fate–like this election–was out of his control. This is simply not a good year to say, “Joe, take care of your health care yourself.” It seems an impossible year for McCain’s Reagan Republican philosophy.

McCain entered the third debate with Obama a chastened man. Half the Republican savants seemed to have given up on him; the other half were offering bad advice. Worse, he seemed to have realized–finally–the permanent threat to his reputation that his campaign had become. The moment of truth may have occurred at an Oct. 6 rally. “Who is the real Barack Obama?” McCain asked. “A terrorist!” a man bellowed. McCain seemed to wince, roll his eyes, retreat. He didn’t admonish the man, but the incident was unsettling, and several days later, at a town-hall meeting in Minnesota, he did begin to push back against the ugliness of his crowds. A woman said, “I can’t trust Obama. He’s an Arab,” and McCain replied, “No, ma’am. No, ma’am, he’s not. He’s a decent family man–citizen–that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

It wouldn’t be entirely fair to blame McCain for the bilious mess his party has become. The most vehement of the Republican faithful live in an alternative universe, fermented by decades of Rush Limbaugh’s brilliantly meretricious baloney and Sean Hannity’s low-rent bullying. As McCain’s audiences went out of control, Hannity stoked the rage with a “documentary” about Obama that featured, without qualification, a poisonously flaky anti-Semite who claimed to know Obama was a Muslim. But McCain had consistently stoked the rage as well, with nonstop negative advertising and by questioning Obama’s patriotism and trying to make an Everest out of the anthill of Obama’s association–passing, at best–with the former terrorist William Ayers. Those gambits, plus McCain’s monumentally dreadful selection of a running mate unqualified for the presidency, have defined the Republican’s campaign. According to the polls, the stunts and attacks have hurt more than they have helped, which is a wonderful thing: a very worried public is taking this election very seriously.

McCain’s benighted handlers had been stuck too deep in the Rovian mud to pick up on that. But in the days just before the debate, McCain returned to the acceptable boundaries of presidential politics with a punchy new stump speech that was plenty critical of Obama but critical on matters of substance, not inference. Obama would raise taxes. He would spend too much. He would “concede defeat in Iraq.” And then, in a perfect valedictory to his career, McCain said, “I’m an American. And I choose to fight.” It is impossible to say what McCain’s fate would have been if he had taken this tough but traditional tack and also chosen Senator Joe Lieberman, the Vice President he really wanted, as former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd suggested he should have done. No doubt, given the political tides, Obama would still be ahead, but McCain would seem a more plausible alternative and still have his honor intact.

The structural weakness of McCain’s position was evident every time Obama described a program–health care, education, energy–in the third debate. CNN’s focus group of independent Ohioans would send the dials on their electric gizmos spinning into the stratosphere. They loved the idea that government would spend more on education or energy or regulate the health-insurance companies. They also loved the idea that government should do this carefully–McCain’s best moment was when he described how he’d cut waste. But McCain always looked as if he were a kernel of corn about to pop. He blinked, he spluttered. He interrupted Obama constantly. At times, McCain’s outrage seemed righteous, as when he thundered that he was not Bush. (The focus group punished Obama when he mentioned the “failed policies of the past eight years.”) But even righteous outrage seemed much too hot this year. In his anger, McCain confirmed a sad truth about his campaign: that the prime source of the negativity was the candidate himself.

time.com/swampland