October 16, 2008
Three Guys and a Table
By GAIL COLLINS
The last debate! Couldn’t help feeling nostalgic Wednesday night. It was a little like the last bonfire at summer camp.
So many memories. That Republican debate where people had to raise their hands if they didn’t believe in evolution. The snowman who asked the question about global warming. The time John Edwards made fun of Hillary Clinton’s jacket. Dennis Kucinich. Ron Paul. “That one.” And now, the sufferings of Joe the Plumber.
O.K., on second thought, perhaps not quite as much fun as summer camp.
For the last two years, dedicated voters have practically lived with Barack Obama and John McCain. We’ve watched three dozen debates! We’ve seen them in groups large enough to stage a small invasion, then one-on-one, then at a faux town hall, surrounded by regular people made only slightly irregular by the rule prohibiting any show of emotion. We’ve seen them debate standing behind podiums, wandering around the stage, and finally — in a dramatic change of pace — sitting around a table! On swivel chairs!
The staggering McCain campaign virtually closed down this week as everybody attempted to come up with a big debate game-changer that did not require an entirely different pair of candidates.
Once he calmed down and stopped grinning manically, McCain did, indeed, go on the offensive. He not only managed to compare Barack Obama to Herbert Hoover, he told America that the community group Acorn was “maybe destroying the fabric of democracy” with their sloppy voter-registration programs.
Did it work? Was the audience moved by McCain’s description of the plight of Joe, the Ohio plumber, who discovered that the Obama program might mean higher taxes for him if his business were to net more than $250,000 a year? Or were they stunned by the idea that anybody still expects to make that much money in the foreseeable future?
For a while, it seemed as if Joe was sitting right there at the table. McCain began addressing him directly through the TV screen. (“If you’re out there, my friend ...”) Then, at one point, Obama joined in the discussion with the phantom plumber, and the two candidates for president of the United States argued over whose health care plan Joe would like the best. By next week, I expect Joe will have his own cable TV show. Or at a minimum, a really fancy blog.
You had to give McCain credit for spunk. It’s been, after all, a dreadful couple of weeks. He built his entire Senate career around low taxes, low spending and a war on those earmarks that his peers use to get special funding for their pet projects. Then suddenly he was in Washington voting to give the secretary of the Treasury $750 billion for what turned out to be a partial-government takeover of the banking system. Not only was he financing a semi-socialist handout to wasteful financiers, the bill was also stuffed with earmarks. Evil, hateful, soul-destroying earmarks!
O.K., debates done. We’re ready to move on. We’ve compared the economic recovery plans. We know more about Bill Ayers the ex-Weatherman than his mother does. We have developed a tic when we hear the words “my friends.” We are really, really well acquainted with Barack Obama and John McCain.
Neither, to be honest, is everything we were hoping for when this all began. Back to that summer camp metaphor: Obama is like the coolest, most popular camper. You can’t wait to see him again after school starts. Then you discover that back in real life, he’s founder of the Model Boat Society and the president of the Safety Club. And McCain is like the head counselor who led all the hikes and who you wished was your older brother. Until you realized that he spent the cold weather hanging out at a biker bar and watching reruns of “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
And they’ve moved on, too. None of their effort during the debate was for those of us who have been with them since the beginning. At this point, they only care about the small chunk of undecided voters in swing states. That means a handful of people in Ohio who have managed to avoid noticing that Obama and McCain disagree on virtually every important issue facing the nation and continue to insist that they are torn between them.
Plus, of course, a couple of folks who got picked for a long-running television panel of undecided voters and don’t want to admit they’ve made up their minds because they’ll get thrown out.
This is one of the reasons why the last few weeks of a presidential campaign tend to be so awful. The candidates are gearing their remarks to people who have managed to completely ignore nearly two years of news about the 2008 elections. In the end, it’s always all about the ones who play hard to get.
