E.J. Dionne: Nowhere for McCain to Go

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081007_nowhere_for_mccain_to_go/

Nowhere for McCain to Go
Posted on Oct 7, 2008
By E.J. Dionne


Tuesday night’s debate, a town-hall discussion dominated by economic questions, made it clear that John McCain’s efforts to change the campaign’s focus to the culture wars of the 1960s is not going to work. Voters want candidates to talk about problems and how to solve them, especially the enormous ones we are confronting now.

And so it was that while McCain took shots at Barack Obama—about his “cronies and his friends” at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, about his tax proposals, about his health-care plan—he could not drag the debate into the more obscure and personal assaults on his Democratic foe that his campaign is peddling. Doing so would not have looked serious or in touch.

snip//

There was a revealing exchange about midway through the debate. When asked whether Americans other than our men and women in uniform should be asked to sacrifice for the country, McCain spoke almost entirely about cutting or freezing government programs. It was a strange answer from a man whose military career was characterized by years of punishing patriotic sacrifice.

Obama caught the idealism behind the query, criticizing President Bush’s call for Americans to shop after the Sept. 11 attacks. He spoke of the need for individual energy conservation; called for expansion of service programs, including the Peace Corps; and described the hunger among young people to serve their country. McCain sounded like a legislator, Obama like a president.

A few days ago, McCain, pressing his effort to paint Obama as a strange and mysterious figure, asked: “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

The debate raised a different question: Who is the real John McCain? Is he the man who used to tout himself as a problem-solver, or is he the desperate candidate who lurches from attack to attack?

The first McCain showed up Tuesday night, insisting that our “situation today cries out for bipartisanship.” But is that the McCain who would govern? Is that the McCain who is authorizing all those attack ads? Is that the McCain we’ll see tomorrow, and the day after?