Obama, McCain Square Off In Final Debate As Republicans Sag In Polls
Posted October 15, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama clashed Wednesday night in a fiery presidential debate that delved into negative campaigning and saw McCain make one of his most forceful efforts to date to distance himself from President George W. Bush.
“Senator Obama, I am not President Bush,” McCain said when the Illinois senator pointed out that his opponent had voted in favour of four of five Bush budgets despite his relentless criticism of overspending in Washington.
“If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”
Obama stood by his stance that McCain’s policies weren’t much different from Bush’s.
“On the core economic issues that matter to the American people — on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities — you’ve been a vigorous supporter of President Bush. Essentially what you’re proposing is (four) more years of the same thing.”
The Arizona senator was hoping for a miracle performance in the third and final presidential debate, one that might reverse his steady slide in public opinion polls with less than three weeks until U.S. election day.
McCain and Obama went head to head at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., amid depressing news for the Republicans: a new poll that had their candidate trailing Obama by a whopping 14 points, due in part to his negative attacks on his opponent.
Once again, the pressure was on McCain to score a knockout punch while Obama’s only real challenge was to avoid setting himself up for one. McCain was certainly on the offence and was aggressive throughout the debate, but at times seemed close to losing his cool.
Wednesday’s debate, moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS News, focused on domestic policy and the economic crisis facing the United States, but the rivals also sparred in a tense exchange on negative campaigning.
McCain said he found it “so hurtful” that Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who was a civil rights era icon, accused the Arizona senator and his running mate, Sarah Palin, of playing racial politics along the same lines as segregationists of the past.
“And Senator Obama, you didn’t repudiate those remarks,” said an agitated McCain, adding he “always” repudiated similarly offensive remarks made about his opponent.
A composed Obama pointed out that Palin had done nothing to address people in the crowd at her events who have shouted “terrorist” and “kill him.”
“I think the American people are less interested in our hurt feelings during the course of the campaign than addressing the issues that matter to them so deeply,” Obama said.
Canada made its way into the debate, as McCain criticized Obama’s intention to re-negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Canada’s response, McCain said, was to simply state that it would start selling its oil to China. He scoffed at Obama for publicly declaring he would re-open the deal, saying: “You don’t do that.”
Earlier in the debate, Obama smiled as McCain accused him of hurting “Joe the Plumber,” a fellow who came up constantly throughout the debate.
Joe is Joe Wurzelbacher, an Ohio man looking to buy a plumbing business, and someone Obama met on the campaign trail. Wurzelbacher said the Democrat’s tax policies would prevent him from buying the business, and McCain assured him throughout the debate that he had good reason to be nervous.
Both McCain and Obama frequently looked into the camera and addressed Wurzelbacher directly on everything from health insurance to energy and tax policy.
“We both want to cut taxes, the question is who do we want to cut taxes for?” Obama said, accusing McCain of proposing tax cuts for the country’s wealthiest corporations. “I want to provide a tax cut for 95 per cent of Americans.”
McCain was faced with a dilemma on how to go after Obama in Wednesday’s faceoff — the CBS/New York Times poll released earlier in the day suggested that most Americans were offended by the Republican’s attacks on Obama and his relationship with onetime domestic terrorist William Ayers.
After some macho parrying earlier this week between the two men regarding Ayers, Obama reiterated Wednesday night that his association with the man had been minimal after McCain challenged him about their relationship.
Obama questioned earlier this week why McCain hadn’t ever brought up the issue to his face, and in response, the apparently affronted Republican made good on his promise to indeed raise the Ayers association during the third debate.
Wednesday’s poll has Obama leading McCain by 53 per cent to 39 per cent among likely voters less than three weeks before the election. It’s the widest margin of any poll in the campaign so far.
Of the survey’s many findings, this one was arguably the most remarkable: among independents who are likely voters — a group that has hopped back and forth between the McCain and Obama camps for most of the campaign — the Illinois senator now leads by a substantial 18 points. McCain was ahead among those independents last week.
The poll also suggested the Republican’s latest campaign strategy to attack Obama’s character and associations has backfired badly. Twenty-one per cent of voters said their opinion of McCain has changed for the worse in the last couple of weeks, and the top two reasons cited were the negative campaign and McCain’s choice of the controversial Palin as his running mate.
Public perception of Palin hasn’t been bolstered by her role as the McCain campaign’s primary attack dog in its much-maligned strategy to go after Obama. At one point, she accused the Illinois senator of “palling around with terrorists.”
At two separate Palin campaign stops — one this week and one last week — someone shouted out “kill him” as she assailed Obama, while another man at a Palin event in Pennsylvania this week yelled out: “Obama Bin Laden.” Those sorts of frightening episodes have prompted some high-profile Republicans to deride their candidate’s strategy as divisive and dangerous.
Obama’s momentum in the polls at this stage in the campaign is considered rare, since the gap between candidates typically narrows in the United States as election day approaches.
“Over the last couple of U.S. elections it’s been unusual to see any candidate with that much of a lead … 2000 and 2004 were very close, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans opened up a lead as large as Obama has this late in the game,” Patrick Egan, a politics professor at New York University, said Wednesday.
“It’s a very strong lead, and one that’s difficult to overcome.”
Photo Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
