10.16.2008

John McCain's Anger Management Tour


Senator John McCain extended his "Anger Mismanagement Tour" during last night's debate. According to Harold Meyerson from the Washington Post: 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 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....

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.

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