The Final Debate: Angry White Man

John of the Grimaces met Barack the Unflappable in Hempstead tonight, and the guy with the arctic cool, not surprisingly, prevailed.

Now we know why Obama’s aides were goading McCain earlier this week to raise the Bill Ayres issue in the debate. They wanted to play McCain’s rage against Obama’s measured, judicious, statesmanlike, even a bit boring presidentiality. And McCain obliged them big time.

The Arizona senator had been doing well up until that moment, which came about half an hour into the debate. But as he recounted the Obama attack ads (which may outnumber McCain’s in raw numbers, since Obama has more money than God, but which come nowhere close to the percentage of McCain commercials that are attack ads), McCain started seething, and after Obama answered his attack on the Ayres connection, McCain couldn’t stop. He kept on attacking, then remembered that people didn’t actually like this, pirouetted to say that his campaign was about issues, and fell flat on his face, not to rise again for the duration of the debate.

The Obama campaign has always believed that if McCain was going to be knocked out in the course of a debate, it would be at the hands of McCain. Obama’s role, not the most scintillating, was to swat away the attacks and get back to some real-world issue for the second-half of each answer. It was to look resolute, but also to be the world’s least

angry -- or more precisely, anger-able -- black man.

At times, McCain recalled the Bob Dole of the ’96 campaign, mixing indignation with the Beltway shorthand that even a candidate running against Washington cannot escape after spending several decades in Congress. Discussing the merits of the Colombian Free Trade agreement with references to the FARC -- how many Americans knew what the hell he was talking about? By the debate’s last half-hour, in which the candidates went over health care, energy, abortion and education, Obama was on his home turf and McCain plainly wasn’t. (Watching CNN, which has those squiggles representing swing voter reaction to every word, I noted that the dials moved not at all as McCain got into the weeds of his health care plan: On health care, McCain was flat-lining.)

Plainly, Obama’s goals in the three presidential debates were to show his understanding of how the nation’s problems affect real people and to put out some plausible-sounding solutions, and, just as if not more important, to show people he was serious, reliable, thoughtful and safe -- just the guy to steer us through rough economic times. As the debates dwindled down to a precious one, McCain’s goals were all but contradictory: to attack Obama hard enough to get the kid to crack and to reverse voter sentiment, but not hard enough to reinforce the impression that he was waging a preponderantly negative campaign or, worse yet, that he was an angry white man. In short, he had to square a circle. In short, he didn’t.