McCain can play to the base by talking about Ayers and increased taxation all he wants, but it's not going to work this year

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The Not-So-Great Debater

At first, John McCain flinched. Instead of answering directly, he suggested, remarkably, that it was Barack Obama who was running the more negative campaign. Polls show that this is certainly not the impression of voters. They see McCain as the negative guy.

But eventually McCain launched the attack everyone was waiting for, referring to Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, the '60s radical with whom Obama served on a Chicago education board that also included Republican members. Obama calmly noted that his relationship with Ayers was limited and that Ayers would play no role in an Obama administration.

McCain was wound up, and before he was done, he made the astonishing claim that some fraudulent voter registrations obtained by ACORN--that's the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now--constituted "one of the greatest frauds in voter history" and were "maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." Gosh, I didn't know our democratic fabric was so frail.

Ayers, ACORN and Joe the Plumber were the stars of McCain's desperate effort in the third and final presidential debate to revive a candidacy that has been on the skids ever since the economic crisis hit. (Joe, whose last name is Wurzelbacher and who runs a plumbing business in Ohio, confronted Obama recently at a campaign stop because he didn't like the idea that Obama would raise his taxes. He's become a hero on some conservative Web sites.)

This trio of attacks almost certainly did McCain good among those whose votes he already has: very conservative Republicans who share Joe's view that Obama is some kind of socialist. But it's unlikely that McCain helped himself much with the moderate and middle-class voters who have drifted away from him. He failed to rattle the ever-calm Obama. And it's hard to see that anything McCain said repaired the damage done to his campaign by the economic crisis and his handling of it. The instant polls gave the round to Obama.