The Blog @ Spolitics

McCain Let Obama off the Hook

I’m not a big fan of empathetic McCain and I was hoping to see the impassioned candidate who was on the stump yesterday.

While McCain did go after Fannie and Freddie during the debate, he didn’t do enough to hammer the points home and keep Obama on the defensive. For example, when Obama respond to McCain by pointing out McCain didn’t right the bill calling for regulatory reform for Fannie and Freddie, McCain could have revisited the point. He could have said, “It doesn’t matter whether I wrote it or not. I supported it. I went to the floor and spoke out in its favor because it was the reform we needed. Senator Obama did not support the bill. And, again, Senator Obama received more money from Fannie and Freddie than every other Senator besides Chris Dodd.” Obama’s failure to support more regulation for Fannie and Freddie plays to McCain’s strengths and he should have revisited it every chance he got. McCain also could have talked about Obama’s ties to ACORN and his support for pushing banks to make risky loans. He didn’t.

It was clear tonight that Obama gets rattled. We saw it when he seemed he asked Tom Brokaw to disregard the rules of the debate and give him a chance to respond. Obama came off as whiny and feeble. With more pressure, McCain could have kept him on the ropes and perhaps even forced a mistake. But McCain seemed more concerned with demonstrating empathy for the economic plight of Americans than with keeping the pressure on Obama and highlighting his radical tendencies. One has to believe it’s a loosing battle for him to try and out-populist a Democrat, yet that appeared to be his strategy.

One of the biggest missed opportunities came when Obama cited Education as a priority. McCain missed an opening to talk about Obama’s record on the Annenberg Challenge funding radical education programs at the expense of basic math and science skills and tie it into his “look at our records” theme. It’s not enough for McCain to say “look at our records.” It was incumbent upon him to highlight the aspect of Obama’s record that he wanted people to look at and he didn’t do it tonight.