Post-debate polls give nod to unflappable Obama

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Sen. John McCain came out swinging, but he only knocked himself out in the third presidential debate Wednesday night. Barring the unforeseen, Sen. Barack Obama can now look forward to a smooth cruise into the White House.

Mr. McCain, Arizona Republican, finally did what candidates have tried and failed to do before him: Try to put his confident opponent on the ropes in the last of their presidential debates when he should have tried that strategy in the first one. Instead, critics charged that he came across as an old, irascible and out-of-touch politician who only succeeded in making Mr. Obama - 25 years Mr. McCain’s junior and with 18 years less experience in the U.S. Senate - look more presidential.

First polls conducted by telephone after the debate gave it overwhelmingly to Mr. Obama, Illinois Democrat. A CBS News/Knowledge Networks poll gave him a landslide 53 percent winners’ rating compared with a wretched 22 percent for Mr. McCain.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll came to the same conclusion, giving the debate to Mr. Obama 58 percent to 31 percent. On likability - always a crucial factor in such clashes - Mr. Obama trounced Mr. McCain even more convincingly by 70 percent to 22 percent.

Mr. McCain continued the same losing strategy that has seen him lose a narrow 2 percent lead a month ago before the Lehman Brothers collapse started the great financial crisis. Today, Mr. Obama is 8 percent ahead on average in national polls, and, as we have noted in these columns repeatedly, his advantage in most of the battleground states of the Midwest and the industrial Northeast is far greater.

Mr. McCain became obsessed with trying to embarrass or pressure Mr. Obama into making some huge indiscretion: He couldn’t. He failed to provide any new ideas, specific plans or convincing reassurances on the economy, the issue that trumps all others for working- and middle-class Americans. Mr. McCain tried to be feisty, but his attitude came across as desperate. Mr. Obama was dismissive, but that played well as unflappable.

Mr. McCain invoked “Joe the Plumber,” Williams Ayers and ACORN, but not the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Mr. Obama’s radical pastor for 20 years. Mr. Obama continued his successful tack of making Mr. McCain President Bush’s acolyte. That did provoke the line of the night, when Mr. McCain replied, “If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

But this was a debate in which an underdog candidate needed a lot more than a minor zinger to turn the tide flowing against him.

There wasn’t much new said as far as policy. But the candidates outlined their established stances on the economy, with Mr. McCain pointing out that Joe the Plumber certainly didn’t like Mr. Obama’s plan any more than Mr. McCain did and Mr. Obama promising no tax increases for anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

Mr. Obama held his ground, and continued to push his argument that the incumbent president was to blame for about every bad thing that has ever happened. But since Mr. Bush is ending an eight-year presidency notable for his determination to push his own policies through, with his Republican Party controlling Congress for the first six years of his two terms, it was always going to be incumbent on Mr. McCain to plausibly convince the American public that he would do things differently and better. On national security, he made that sale. But on the economy and finance, he gave the impression that he didn’t even know where to start.

The polling data are clear: Far from stemming Mr. Obama’s momentum, Mr. McCain gave it a huge, supercharged boost. This campaign is increasingly starting to look like the 1980 contest, in reverse. Republican Ronald Reagan unexpectedly pulled far ahead of incumbent President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in the final weeks of the race. Now Mr. Obama is showing the same surge capability that Mr. Reagan did then.

Note also that Mr. Obama’s campaign is infinitely better organized than Mr. McCain’s: In a race in which there is a strong shift in favor of the Illinois senator, his superb organization is perfectly poised to maximize turnout, flood key-state markets with ads and generally make the most of it.

Mr. McCain’s hopes have gone the way of Tuesday’s dead cat bounce in the stock market. The Arizona senator dreamed of being the second coming of Theodore Roosevelt, the tough talking Republican war hero a century ago. Instead he has opened the way for Mr. Obama to try to craft a New Deal similar to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And FDR gave the Democrats a 20-year lock on the White House.

Martin Sieff is defense industry editor for United Press International.