The third and final presidential debate with Republican nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois featured forceful back-and-forth attacks, including the emergence of Sen. McCain going on the offense, criticizing Sen. Obama’s associations with Bill Ayers and the organization ACORN.
Up in the polls and leading most electoral map projections, Sen. Obama took a safe approach, never going to the extreme that Sen. McCain went to question his opponent’s judgment or character.
But McCain refused to hold back. After being mum on Obama’s relationship with either Ayers or ACORN in the previous two debates, McCain went full-force to tie Obama to the radical Ayers who was part of an organization that bombed the Capitol building and the Pentagon and connect Obama with the community-focused organization ACORN that McCain said was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
McCain told moderator Bob Scieffer that “we need to know the full extent of” those relationships.
Obama defended his connections, answering McCain’s Ayers accusations with his usual narrative: that Ayers had engaged in “despicable acts” when he was only “8 years old,” and that they both served on a “school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan's former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.”
On ACORN, which is being investigated in several swing states around the country for alleged fake voter registrations, Obama responded that “what they've done is they were paying people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people who were out there didn't really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names,” denying that there was any connection between the organization and his campaign.
But McCain wouldn’t budge, questioning Obama’s “judgment” of sending “$230,000 to ACORN.”
Additionally, Obama blasted McCain for making Ayers “the centerpiece of [his] campaign over the last two or three weeks” and not instead focusing his campaign’s resources on focusing on the economic crisis.
“Sen. McCain's own campaign said publicly last week that, if we keep on talking about the economic crisis, we lose, so we need to change the subject,” said Obama. “And I would love to see the next three weeks devoted to talking about the economy, devoted to talking about health care, devoted to talking about energy, and figuring out how the American people can send their kids to college.”
When asked about negative campaigning, Obama said that a recent CBS News poll found that “two-thirds of the American people think that Sen. McCain is running a negative campaign versus one-third of mine.”
“And 100 percent, John, of your ads—100 percent of them have been negative,” Obama reiterated.
Not true, said McCain, criticizing the junior Senator from Illinois of negative campaigning of his own. During Friday’s National Football League game between the Arizona Cardinals and the Dallas Cowboys, McCain said, “every other ad was an attack ad” on his health care plan, stance on stem cell research, and immigration.
“Sen. Obama is spending unprecedented—unprecedented in the history of American politics, going back to the beginning, amounts of money in negative attack ads on me,” McCain said.
The hostility that highlighted the debate didn’t just end there. Both candidates for the highest office in the land repeatedly and sometimes aggressively attacked each other and each other’s domestic policies, the topic of the debate.
When Obama compared McCain and his policies to those of President Bush, McCain retorted, “I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”
McCain also derided Obama over his “eloquence,” while both McCain and Obama said several times in response of alleged misrepresentations of their policies that what their opponent said was simply “not true.”
Joe Shmoe
The debate on economic policies wouldn’t be overshadowed, however. It featured a new citizen celebrity, another famous Joe: this time not Joe Six-Pack, but Joe the plumber, one Joe Wurzelbacher Obama had an encounter with in Ohio at a rally this week.
“Joe wants to buy the business that he has been in for all of these years, worked 10, 12 hours a day. And he wanted to buy the business but he looked at your tax plan and he saw that he was going to pay much higher taxes,” McCain said to Obama.
“You were going to put him in a higher tax bracket which was going to increase his taxes, which was going to cause him not to be able to employ people, which Joe was trying to realize the American dream,” said Sen. McCain, disapproving of Sen. Obama’s tax plan that would, in Sen. Obama’s words, provide a tax cut for 95 percent of working Americans.”
Obama’s plan would raise taxes on the richest Americans, and McCain claimed that would include small business like Joe the plumber’s. Obama didn’t deny the fact, but instead said that he wanted to “make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn't yet have money” would get a tax break, which required him to make “some important choices” about who to give tax breaks to.
“We both want to cut taxes,” said Obama. "The difference is who we want to cut taxes for.”
Meanwhile, McCain again presented his controversial proposal to buy bad home loan mortgages that sparked the subprime mortgage crisis and continued to the current economic situation. He proposed to take $300 billion and “buy those home loan mortgages and negotiate with those people in their homes, 11 million homes or more, so that they can afford to pay the mortgage, stay in their home.”
“We ought to put the homeowners first. And I am disappointed that Secretary Paulson and others have not made that their first priority,” Sen. McCain said.
Meanwhile, Obama spoke of an economic plan that addresses not just mortgages, but also gives tax breaks to companies that create jobs and eliminates penalties for Americans who tap into their IRA retirement savings in a crisis.
Obama said that his plan wasn’t a “giveaway to banks,” while McCain’s policies would be, he said. Additionally, Obama said that the government, in response to economic crises, should not “waste taxpayer money.” President Bush and both houses of Congress approved a mammoth bill two weeks ago that used $700 billion of taxpayer money to buy out and hold bad assets of struggling banks until their value increased. Both Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain voted for that bill.
