... And Bluster for All: McCain Forgot His Case

As the presidential campaign neared the finish line, John McCain increasingly resembled the prosecutor in "And Justice for All," the one who Al Pacino told jurors "forgot something absolutely essential to the proceeding. He forgot his case ... I don't know, I don't see it, do you?"

The Arizona Senator spent last week likening Barack Obama's tax plan to socialism and raging at the Los Angeles Times for not releasing a video of the Illinois Senator at a dinner where other speakers allegedly made anti-Israel remarks.

His running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, campaigned as a team with the man known as Joe the Plumber, calling to mind the scene in "Stand by Me" where one 12-year-old asks who would win a fight between Superman and Mighty Mouse and another derisively reminds him that Mighty Mouse is just a cartoon character.

Palin Looking Past '08?

And behind the scenes there were reports of backbiting between Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin, who was accused by unnamed McCain aides of not taking direction and creating problems for the campaign because she was more intent on positioning herself to run for President in 2012 than helping the man who picked her launch a comeback.

A CONTRAST IN TONE: While Arizona Sen. John McCain has gone overwhelmingly negative in trying to overcome Barack Obama's lead in the polls, the Illinois Senator has continued to focus on what's wrong with the nation's economy while urging voters to choose 'unity over division.'

National polls showed only a slight movement to Mr. Obama, whose lead on average hovered at about six points, suggesting the outcome on Nov. 4, the day this newspaper is published, was anything but a foregone conclusion. But there was a marked shift in most battleground states, the ones where the two candidates were focusing most of their resources, with Senator Obama either widening his leads or moving from slightly behind to slightly ahead in the voter surveys.

A major factor in this was undoubtedly the Illinois Senator's huge edge in campaign funds, which allowed for not only saturation bombing of the key television markets but a half-hour national ad buy that ran Oct. 29 on three networks and several cable stations. But there was also the sense that as Mr. McCain tried to hammer Mr. Obama, he was not offering voters much positive reinforcement about his own candidacy. If anything, the sight of Ms. Palin and Joe the Plumber on the stump together symbolized a campaign that had become more about distraction than persuasion, and might have taken on that coloration beginning with Mr. McCain's selection of the Alaska Governor to complete his ticket two months ago.

Ms. Palin's stumbles during interviews with ABC-TV anchor Charles Gibson and his CBS counterpart, Katie Couric, showed how poorly prepared she was for dealing with national and international issues.

Her defenders argued that this was understandable given that the interviews were given within three weeks of her getting the Republican nomination. But this spin depended on its targets believing that she had no reason to start learning about the world outside Alaska until Mr. McCain tapped her on the shoulder and said, "You're the one."

That would presuppose that she didn't need to impress Mr. McCain with her grasp of the issues for him to choose her. And if true, it indicates that the attitude expressed by her future son-in-law about appearing on-stage at the Republican National Convention — ''Whatever'' — summed up both the Arizona Senator's approach to choosing his running mate and Ms. Palin's to learning the pesky details that show you're up to the job.

Earlier in the summer, the McCain campaign ran an ad called "Celebrity," suggesting Senator Obama was not unlike Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears: able to draw a crowd and strike a pose, but with no substance beneath the styling. It's hard to imagine, but that same campaign has since spent $150,000 on clothes, hair and makeup to try to glam up Ms. Palin — and publicly, anyway, did so with a straight face.

In the area where she actually needed some work to smooth off the rough edges, however, the campaign's response has been to try to hide her from prying national reporters and — despite her protests to the contrary of late — she has eagerly gone along.

Helps With Base, Not With Moderates

Governor Palin thrills the conservative base — the people who still think President Bush is doing a heckuva job — but the polls have shown that she has hurt Mr. McCain's chances among moderates and undecided voters, the people he needed to have a chance to defeat Mr. Obama. Usually the impact of a vice-presidential candidate in an election is marginal; when that candidate is dragging the ticket down, it's a sign that someone miscalculated badly.

There are those who say Senator McCain was forced into choosing Governor Palin by his own party's leadership and consented because he feared a rebellion on the right if he went with his own choice and selected Democrat turned Independent Joe Lieberman or a more-conventional — and moderate — running mate like Mitt Romney.

But the fact that it took a Wall Street collapse and a lurch into a recession for Senator Obama to open up some ground in the contest makes clear that Mr. McCain had the option to risk antagonizing the extreme right wing of the GOP without jeopardizing his chances of victory. That he failed to do so means that either he willingly made a seat-of-the-pants gamble on Ms. Palin or, after changing his positions on a number of key issues to curry favor with the Republican true believers, he was a maverick in name only, who would walk the party line if that was what it took to win the White House.

That sense of weariness could be gleaned from his speech accepting the GOP nomination: the only time he really came alive was when he spoke of his experiences in a North Vietnamese prison camp four decades ago and how they had transformed him. It was as if that was the one part of his biography that remained real to him, that he could refer to proudly because too many of his other brave stands over the years he has since contradicted in pursuit of this year's nomination.

Playing the Socialist Card

He seemed to be flying in circles during the congressional deliberations on a Wall Street bailout, talking at one point about scrapping a debate in order to help broker an agreement but then adding nothing constructive to the discussions.

It was at that point that the word "socialism" re-entered the national dialogue, with some Republican Congressmen using it to indicate their distaste for reining in large financial institutions while simultaneously rescuing them. This stance seemed particularly odd because free-market capitalism on Wall Street had already slid way past socialism and into the realm of anarchy, a result of the deregulation that Mr. McCain had long championed.

Now he and Ms. Palin try to convince voters that discontinuing the portion of the Bush tax cuts that has provided a windfall to the wealthiest Americans over the past seven years is the first step in the decline of the old-fashioned opportunity society.

But bringing the tax code closer to where it was when Bill Clinton left office is not socialism on the march; it is a practical response to an economic debacle caused by George Bush's policies. And Mr. McCain's attempt to argue that there is something un-American about Mr. Obama's proposal is undercut by the fact that he himself voted against the Bush tax cuts of both 2001 and 2003 that his opponent now wants to phase out.

Joe the Deadbeat

The enlistment of Joe the Plumber — real name Samuel Wurzelbacher — in Mr. McCain's attempt to paint Mr. Obama as someone who wants to take away striving Americans' hard-earned wages and give them to the less-deserving does not have the real-world impact the candidate undoubtedly was aiming for. Part of the problem is that Mr. Wurzelbacher is not, contrary to what he had indicated when he confronted Mr. Obama in Ohio, a licensed plumber, let alone someone who was on the verge of buying a business and therefore vulnerable to the candidate's corporate tax plan.

He is also someone who was delinquent on child-support payments, which made him one of those deadbeats who presumably the McCain camp was warning would unjustifiably reap the fruits of the Obama "spread the wealth" plan. Now, however, thanks to the Republican nominee's decision to extend Joe the Plumber's media shelf life beyond the two-day phenomenon he would otherwise have been, Mr. Wurzelbacher is on the verge of turning into the kind of success story that James Frey couldn't make up.

The attempts by Senator McCain and Governor Palin to tie William Ayers around Senator Obama's neck are another of the side-shows that have consumed his supporters but failed to gain traction with the larger electorate. There are people who, with some justification, will never forgive Mr. Ayers for his days as a leader of the Weather Underground, the lunatic fringe of the old Students for a Democratic Society that degenerated into trying to blow up buildings and kill law-enforcement officials. But by the time Mr. Obama met him, Mr. Ayers had become a respected figure in the education world, and their limited board work together was nothing that should set off alarm bells.

A Different Climate This Time

Republicans in the past have gotten lots of mileage out of this kind of tangential issue, but unlike President Bush in his two campaigns, Mr. McCain has to overcome the serious doubts that an overwhelming majority of voters feel about where the nation is going and how their own futures could be affected.

There was a distinct irony to one New York Post columnist's reaction — in this case, TV editor Adam Buckman — to Mr. Obama's infomercial last week. He asserted that it wound up "stressing everything that is wrong with America and little right with it."

But while the Obama half-hour drew comparisons elsewhere to President Reagan's "Morning in America" spot based on its format and some of its imagery, "stressing everything that is right" is an incumbent's (or his chosen replacement's) modus operandi. The challenger's argument to voters for making a change is based on there being something that badly needs fixing and can only be done by a fresh face.

That message has communicated powerfully with voters, so much so that over the past few weeks Senator McCain has not only distanced himself from President Bush but actively criticized his stewardship. By last week he was trying the impossible by suggesting that Mr. Obama's big-spending inclinations cast him more in the mold of Mr. Bush than he himself is.

But Mr. Obama just kept running hard, hitting back when he had to but focusing his message on connecting with voters in the middle, even as Mr. McCain's more-strident attacks seemed likely to drive them away.

'Choose Hope Over Fear'

The end of Senator Obama's infomercial cut to a live rally in Florida where he said, "In six days, we can choose hope over fear, unity over division, the promise of change over the power of the status quo."

He is running as the candidate of hope and unity; Mr. McCain has tried to counter by stirring up fears about what Mr. Obama might do and suggesting that somehow he is alien to what America stands for. The polls indicate, however, that Americans are ready to vote with their hopes.

It was why one union leader who would have been far more likely to endorse the Republican than his opponent had he taken a position in the race recently predicted Senator Obama would wind up with 325 electoral votes; why one veteran political consultant not given to believing the polls last week predicted "Obama by double digits."

Quinnipiac College polling director Mickey Carroll, who four years ago correctly predicted Mr. Bush's re-election when it appeared John Kerry had a slight edge, said Oct. 30 that he had a gut feeling that Mr. McCain still had a shot, but "the numbers say Obama — and Obama easy."

If he's right, the reason may be that Mr. McCain's own gut instincts failed him as much as the economy did. As much as many of us may vote based on personality rather than issues, in a time of crisis the public will almost always favor the candidate who has a plan over the one who is flailing after he splits the seat of his pants.