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I take back what I said about his bright future even as a Fox News star.
Joe is a faux plumber! (Quel horreur!) And a tax scofflaw! And something about Obama just happens to remind him of Sammy Davis Jr.! And-- if true, this next thing is weirder than weird—Joe may be related by marriage to Charles Keating, star of the S &L scandal that almost ended McCain's Senate career! And—his name's not even Joe!
By now I am starting to feel kind of sorry for Joe. Faux Joe. Samuel. Whatever his name is. He registered as a Republican last spring. By now, he's probably having second thoughts about how great it is to be championed by John McCain before a viewing audience of 38 million U.S. households.
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According to the Washington Post, McCain got it wrong tonight when he said that, under Obama's health-care plan, Joe the plumber would pay a fine if he didn't provide his employees health insurance, because the Obama plan has an exemption for small businesses. Given that McCain from practically the first sentence trucked in Joe, last name and all, as his carefully planted and lovingly tended Real Guy, isn't this the definition of campaign malpractice? How could his staff have possibly failed to get Joe right? McCain was often strong tonight, on guard and on the offensive. But when he registered open-mouthed surprise as Obama explained why he was wrong about Joe, McCain looked like a man playing Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin asking for a life line. Obama had his weak moments, too, in the reaction shots, like the big smile he cracked while McCain was making serious charges about Bill Ayers and ACORN. Watching them listen sometimes seems more enlightening than listening to them talk.
Read more XX Factor posts about Joe the Plumber.
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A small point about the debate last Friday: Obama called McCain "John" routinely in the first part of the debate, switching to "Senator McCain" only after McCain pointedly refused to return the favor by saying "Barack," ever. In debators' terms, it was a clear win for McCain: He stiff-armed his opponent and took for himself more authority. As I was watching, I kept thinking Obama should stop, and then eventually he did.
But Saturday-morning quarterbacking by looking at the polls Rosa cites, I wonder if some voters in the middle read Obama's concessional speech patterns in a different way. LIke Obama's statements that McCain is right about various points, the friendly wave of "John" could be read as confident and magnanimous. Maybe Obama will be more aggressive in the next debate—certainly he'll hear lots of exhortations to move in that direction. But I wonder if these courtly overtures served a purpose, even if McCain is using it against him in the ad he cut before the debate ended. If nothing else, it says something that Obama came off as McCain's equal even while repeating, "John is absolutely right."
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So I thought McCain did slightly "better" in the debate than Obama. Like Dahlia, I thought Obama came across as wonky—he had trouble shifting from long, rather academic-sounding answers to short and punchy. I though McCain seemed folksy and confident while Obama seemed annoyed and sometimes defensive. McCain was aggressive; Obama was a little overly polite. McCain had a theme: "Me experienced, Obama naive." Obama—well, he was being too complicated.
But what do I know? The preliminary post-debate polls and focus groups suggest that most people saw something different in that debate. A CBS post-debate poll of 500 uncommitted voters saw 39 percent saying Obama won, 24 percent saying McCain won, and the rest declaring it a draw. And the CBS poll doesn't seem to be an outlier. According to the Financial Times:
A CNN survey of viewers said 51 per cent thought Mr Obama had won the debate, compared with 38 per cent for Mr McCain, with a big majority of women backing Mr Obama. In a Fox News focus group most viewers said Mr Obama had emerged the winner.
Same with the Frank Luntz and Stanley Greenberg focus groups.
Strikes me that most media commentators reacted as I did. But are we parsing these debates in a way that no one else was, making mountains out of too many molehills? (Or did everyone else just fall asleep halfway through the debate?)
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Back when that book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten came out, I thought about how everything I needed to know I learned in my 92 years of dating. And as it turns out, those lessons hold up pretty well in political life, too, in that chemistry and timing trump reason and a common goal more often than we'd like to admit.
Political life does not always mirror the real thing, though: If New Hampshire were an employer and Hillary Clinton a job candidate, she would have been out of contention the minute her eyes filled with tears during the interview. As those Sex and the City women (thank you, Trailhead) and every flesh-and-blood XX knows, men can throw phones and wastebaskets across the office and that's cool, but a woman who lets a tear fall is toast.
Which really might explain - sorry, but the instant Conventional Wisdom does occasionally get it right -- why women who could relate rode to Clinton's rescue last night. In future contests, I'm guessing Obama will refrain from gratuitous, way-beneath-him swipes like "You're likeable enough, Hillary.'' But that still leaves her with the same problem Al Gore had in 2000: What about Bill?
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