Candidates take the gloves off to fight over negative campaigning, taxes, abortion and health care.
Forget Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. The real winner at Wednesday night's presidential debate was a guy from Ohio called "Joe the Plumber."
In their most bare-knuckle meeting yet, the men vying for the White House got personal at Hofstra University during a 90-minute debate focused on domestic issues ranging from the tanking economy to education, abortion and the Supreme Court.
(Which candidate do you think won the debate? Go to the MTV Newsroom blog to weigh in.)
Both candidates sharpened their attacks and tried to give one final impression of his opponent — McCain again painting Obama as a typical big-spending liberal who is going to raise taxes, Obama repeating his assertion that McCain will continue the failed policies of President Bush. But they also veered off topic to air dirty campaign laundry and argue over who was going to do more to help Joe the Plumber.
As the candidates sat at a large table within a few feet of each other and moderator Bob Schieffer, McCain went on offense early in the evening, responding with a snap to an early assertion from Obama that the Arizona senator would keep up the policies that have led to the biggest national deficits in American history.
"Essentially, what you are proposing is eight more years of the same thing — and it hasn't worked," Obama said. "And the American people know it hasn't worked."
Looking like he'd been waiting to unwrap the line for weeks, McCain responded to a question about whether he could balance the budget in four years by saying, "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." The line was already being called out as the quote of the evening by many pundits moments after the debate ended, but it did not throw the calm, measured Obama — whom some Republican commentators on CNN called "professorial" and cold during the debate.
One of the most heated exchanges of the night, though, came when Schieffer brought up the relentlessly negative tone of the campaign and asked both men if they would repeat to each other's face some of their campaigns' nastiest charges.
McCain sounded genuinely hurt when recounting a recent comment from Representative John Lewis, who said that McCain and running mate Sarah Palin were stoking the fires of hatred much like 1960s segregationist George Wallace did. McCain asked Obama to repudiate Lewis' comments, and Obama said he had already done so.
When the question came up again about what proposals they could cut given the current financial disaster, Obama once more appeared to talk around the answer. He mentioned cutting the $15 billion spent per year on insurance company subsidies and said the answer is to invest in education, health care and energy policies. McCain pointed to several obscure budget items, including marketing assistance programs, ethanol subsidies and tariffs on imported sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil.
But back to Joe the Plumber. According to The New York Times, he is Joe Wurzelbacher, a small-business owner from Ohio who was seen speaking to Obama earlier this week. He became a running example during the night of how differently the two candidates plan to fix what ails the country. McCain said Obama wants to tax people like Joe out of business and force them to buy health care while attempting to "spread the wealth around" to lower-income Americans. Obama said the opposite was true, that he wants to give Joe a tax break right now.
"You were going to put him in a higher tax bracket, which was going to increase his taxes, which was going to cause him to not be able to employ people, which Joe was trying to realize the American dream," McCain said, accusing Obama of engaging in "class warfare." He asked Obama why he would want to increase taxes in the current economic climate.
"Now, Senator Obama talks about the very, very rich. Joe, I want to tell you, I'll not only help you buy that business that you worked for your whole life and be able ... I'll keep your taxes low, and I'll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees," McCain said.
Obama reiterated that his plan would cut taxes for 95 percent of working families, adding that an independent study found that his plan provided three times the tax relief to the middle class as Senator McCain's. "Now the conversation I had with Joe the plumber, what I essentially said to him was, 'Five years ago, when you were in a position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then,' " Obama responded.
The elephant in the room, though, was the William Ayers question. McCain's camp had, until this week, been daily questioning Obama's truthfulness and judgment by attempting to link him to the 1960s radical, and McCain had vowed to bring Ayers up for the first time in person on Wednesday night. Obama smiled when the subject finally was on the table and said, "Mr. Ayers is not involved in this campaign, he has never been involved in my campaign, and he will not advise me in the White House." Obama added that the fact that McCain keeps bringing up Ayers, "says more about your campaign than it says about me."
McCain also questioned Obama's association with the community organization ACORN, which has been accused of hiring workers whose job it was to sign up new voters, but some of whom filled out their forms with phony names. McCain accused the organization of being "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." Obama said his campaign has nothing to do with ACORN and that he represented the organization years ago as part of a "Motor Voter" project in Illinois to register voters at their DMV offices.
While McCain accused Obama of spending more money on negative ads than any campaign in history, Obama shot back that McCain has run "100 percent" negative ads, an assertion McCain refuted. "This has been a tough campaign," McCain said, suggesting that if perhaps Obama had agreed to his suggestion for 10 town-hall style meetings, it might have been less nasty.
"The American people are less interested in our hurt feelings during the course of the campaign than addressing the issues that matter to them so deeply," Obama countered, noting that McCain's own campaign said last week that they would lose the race if they kept talking about the economy.
And when it came down to those issues, both men made it very clear that they do not see eye to eye on most of them. In response to a question about why they thought the country would be better off if their running mate became president, Obama said his VP pick, Senator Joseph Biden, "is one of the finest public servants" in the country's history, with a long list of foreign policy credentials and strong ties to his working-class roots. McCain praised Palin as a "reformer" and "role model to women," who would be a "breath of fresh air" in Washington. Obama ducked a follow-up about whether Palin would be qualified, but McCain said he thought Biden had been wrong on "many foreign-policy and national-security issues" over the years.
Painting Obama as being in concert with "extreme environmentalists" in saying nuclear power isn't safe, McCain said he would deal with climate change by building 45 new nuclear power plants and investing in clean technologies. Obama said he thought it would take 10 years, not four as McCain suggested, to wean American off foreign oil.
They clashed once again on health care, hitting at one another's plans in much the same way as they have in previous debates, but with Joe the Plumber getting into the mix this time when McCain talked about his claims that Obama's plan would fine those who don't sign up, a claim Obama again refuted.
One of the pivotal issues in any presidential campaign, abortion, finally came up when the candidates were asked if they could ever nominate a Supreme Court justice who disagreed with their stance on the Roe vs. Wade decision. McCain, who is against abortion, said he has never imposed a litmus test and said he would look for "the best people ... in the United States" for the job.
Obama, who is pro-choice and wants to uphold Roe vs. Wade, said he would also look for judges with "an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through." McCain lashed at Obama over his voting record while in the Illinois Senate — at one point attempting to tie Obama to the most "extreme" proponents of abortion.
But the men agreed that more needs to be done to prevent unintended pregnancies and that reforming education is so critical as to be a national security issue. Both vowed to give parents more choice and provide funding for more affordable college loans.
McCain ended by saying, "All of these things and all the promises and commitments that Senator Obama and I made to you tonight will ... be based on whether you can trust us or not to be careful stewards of your tax dollar, to make sure America is safe and secure and prosperous, to make sure we reform the institutions of government. That's why I've asked you not only to examine my record, but my proposals for the future of this country."
Saying investing in tax cuts for the middle class, health care for all Americans and college for every young person is necessary, but won't be easy, Obama signed off by admitting that "it's not going to be quick. It is going to be requiring all of us — Democrats, Republicans, independents — to come together and to renew a spirit of sacrifice and service and responsibility. I'm absolutely convinced we can do it. I would ask for your vote, and I promise you that if you give me the extraordinary honor of serving as your president, I will work every single day, tirelessly, on your behalf and on the behalf of the future of our children."
A New York Times/CBS News poll released Tuesday night suggested that the negative campaigning from McCain's camp was not working, with 60 percent of the voters surveyed saying they thought McCain spent more time attacking Obama than explaining what he would do as president to help the country, while 63 percent said they thought Obama has spent more time explaining his policies than attacking McCain.
With Obama up by 8 points and 8 percent of voters still undecided, according to the latest CNN poll, with 8 percent of voters still undecided, both men are scrambling to reach those voters who have not yet made up their minds in the final 20 days of the campaign. It remains to be seen if their performance Wednesday night will be able to tip those scales.