McCain's Conundrum: What More Can He Do?

Dan Balz's Take

McCain's Conundrum: What More Can He Do?

By Dan Balz
NEW YORK -- The final debate of Campaign 2008 was not, in the catch phrase of the day, a game changer. But the campaign certainly changed during the debates, leaving the two candidates in significantly different positions than they were. Barack Obama is now warning about overconfidence and John McCain claims to relish being the underdog.

After Wednesday's debate at Hofstra University, the question for McCain is what more -- or how much more -- he can do to affect the race. Instant polls offered a harsh verdict on a McCain performance that was judged by so-called experts as perhaps his best of the three. In both the CNN and the CBS polls, Obama was judged the winner by a large margin.

Does that invite more drastic attacks by McCain, or a shift toward a less confrontational, more positive campaign during its final 19 days? Can he do both? Can he disqualify Obama while persuading voters he is not the angry challenger? That is among the choices McCain and his team will have to make quickly as they look toward the last days of campaigning. Beyond that, he must decide how to fight to the end against the huge advantage in resources Obama enjoys.

For Obama, overconfidence is just one of the problems he faces. Assuming he now believes he has a good chance of winning the election, he faces of choice of balancing the need to stay focused on the task at hand and thinking about how he wants to gain the broadest public trust possible in the event that he is president-elect on Nov. 5.

Why the disconnect between voters and commentators on the outcome of the debate? One reason is that many voters have already decided for whom they're going to vote and see the debates through that prism. Given his widening lead, it's not surprising that Obama scores well with the viewers. He delivered a steady and smooth performance through all the debates and particularly while under attack through most of Wednesday night's encounter.

There's also a difference between giving McCain high marks and delivering a verdict on who won the actual debate. It's likely both candidates got good reviews on Wednesday night. But in the end, the candidate who arrived at Hofstra with the advantage was the same candidate who left Hofstra with the advantage.

McCain was under pressure to take the argument directly to Obama and he did, with greater clarity and aggressiveness than he had in the previous two debates. CBS's Bob Schieffer also did a good job of trying to force the candidates out of their boilerplate rhetoric, with some success. That produced the liveliest of the three presidential debates.

Both were forced to confront some of the ugliness that has enveloped the campaign the past two weeks. Both claimed to be the victim of the worst of it. But it's not likely that part of the debate resonated much with most voters, especially those still making up their minds or those whose minds might be changed.

For those voters, two things may count more. One is the philosophical divide between Obama and McCain on the big economic and domestic issues. Both candidates have embraced the Bush administration's economic rescue plan, which has radically changed the relationship between government and the private economy. From there they go in dramatically different directions.

McCain's most memorable line was when he tried to distance himself from President Bush. "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I'm going to give a new direction to this economy in this country."

But the policies he proposed for the economy are mostly in line with Republican orthodoxy.

The second area of note is style. McCain was aggressive in making his case against Obama, but less positive in pushing his own. Obama projected steadiness and calm. That difference has played to Obama's advantage over the period of the debates and there was nothing that happened Wednesday night to change that.

Republican strategists were impressed with McCain but still questioned whether it would be enough. "I think McCain was better than before," said Mike Murphy, a GOP strategist and former McCain adviser. "But it remains to be seen if he convinced America to take a new look at his campaign over the next two weeks."

"McCain had a really strong night," said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire-based GOP strategist. "He forced Obama regularly to defend his positions and used that tactic to differentiate ... I think McCain runs to the party base now. He will live in the Bush states and hope to hold it together one last time. This was not about the middle tonight. It was about the Republican right."

Democrat Simon Rosenberg said he thought McCain was aggressive and combative, but he did not think it would be enough to change the race. "In the last few weeks, the American people have learned a lot about these two senators. In Senator Obama, they've decided they see a future president. In Senator McCain, they see an admirable but aging politician who seems a little out of step with the moment."

Obama is now channeling Bill Clinton from 1992, focusing on the economy and deflecting attacks from McCain and the Republicans with the insistence that the final weeks of the campaign should be about the voters and their needs.

McCain's challenge is much greater. Having delivered what he hoped to deliver on Wednesday night, the question is what more he can do.