‘I Am Not President Bush.’

At the Hofstra debate, the simple sentence it took John McCain two years to utter.

By Byron York
http://www.nationalreview.com/
October 16, 2008, 1:05 a.m.

You can talk all you want about Joe the Plumber, but the moment of the final presidential debate, held last night at Hofstra University on Long Island, came when John McCain said, quickly and cleanly, “Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

McCain has been trying for two years to highlight his differences with George W. Bush, but only tonight, 20 days before the election, did he come up with a formulation so straightforward. It wasn’t an accident. “We discovered that the arguments we were making weren’t soaking in, that people weren’t getting it, that he isn’t George Bush,” a key McCain aide told me shortly after the debate. “He’s talked about how he’s opposed the president on certain policies, but one of the things that we had told him to really focus on was to keep the answers clear and simple.” So McCain said it clearly and simply. Given that about 70 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Bush is doing as president, it made more than one observer wonder what took McCain so long.

It’s fair to say Team McCain was delighted with the way the Bush line came out, and they were also happy that McCain was able to steer so much of the debate to the issue of Joe Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber, an Ohio man who confronted Obama this week with concerns that Obama’s proposals would raise taxes on the business Wurzelbacher hoped to buy. In that encounter, Obama told Wurzelbacher, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” It wasn’t exactly what Wurzelbacher wanted to hear, and it made Obama sound like a classic income-redistributing Democrat.

McCain heard about it when it happened — the exchange was played mostly on Fox News — and brought it up at a debate preparation session yesterday. “We were sitting around and he said, ‘Look, I ought to use this. I ought to look into the camera and talk to Joe the Plumber and say this is what I’m going to do, as opposed to what Sen. Obama is going to do.’“ The whole team thought it was a good idea, and so, seated onstage at Hofstra, McCain carried it off perfectly. “Sen. Obama talks about the very, very rich,” he said. “Joe, I want to tell you, I’ll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and be able — and I’ll keep your taxes low and I’ll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees.”

Obama was forced to defend himself at some length, and not very effectively; by the time it was over, McCain had scored a solid win on the Joe issue. And made history, too — in all, the candidates used the word “plumber” eleven times, surely a record for a presidential debate.

As that was happening, members of Team Obama were at their Chicago headquarters, watching the debate with one eye and, with the other, a computer video feed of a private focus group equipped with those electronic dials that Frank Luntz uses on Fox. The private Obama group was made up of swing and undecided voters “in a Midwest state where both campaigns are competing,” one aide told me, declining to say precisely where.

The Obama aides were of course listening closely to what McCain said, but they were also studying what they called McCain’s “nonverbal cues.” “The first huge impression was visual,” the aide told me. “He looked angry, he looked frustrated. It was something that I think people reacted to quite viscerally. People are going to remember the look on John McCain’s face.”

It was, on occasion, kind of an odd look. One of the most appealing things about McCain is that he can’t always hide what he is thinking; try as he might, it just shows in his face. But that can sometimes be a problem in a split-screen close-up televised debate.

When it came to perhaps the most anticipated non-economic subject of the night, Obama’s relationship with former Weather Underground bomber William Ayers, it’s probably fair to say that McCain did not do much damage. In part, that was because Obama knew what was coming. “McCain used — I think it was pretty close to word-for-word the way he has talked about [Ayers] in interviews and on the stump,” the aide told me. “Pretty close to word-for-word.”

The same was true in McCain’s discussion of the radical community organizing group ACORN, with which Obama has sometimes been linked. “There was nothing [McCain] said about ACORN that they hadn’t said in their countless conference calls about it,” the aide told me. “They telegraphed their punches pretty effectively.”

I asked if such predictability made preparing for debates any easier. “It helps,” the aide said.

This was also the only debate that touched on the issue of abortion, when moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS asked whether either man could nominate to the Supreme Court a judicial candidate with whom he disagreed on Roe v. Wade. McCain used the question to disavow any litmus tests for judges, and then brought up Obama’s vote, in the Illinois state senate, against a born-alive protection bill. Pro-lifers were undoubtedly happy to see McCain bring it up, but the Obama aide told me it wasn’t a problem. “When he made the attack on the born-alive legislation, you saw a vertical drop in the dial groups that was pretty astounding,” the aide said. “People didn’t find it credible.” There has been a lot of back-and-forth about what version of the born-alive bill was up for consideration, but you can make a pretty solid case that Obama did indeed do what McCain said he did. Nevertheless, if the aide’s account is correct, people didn’t buy it.

Who won? There seems little doubt that McCain scored many more points than Obama. And if you’re talking about dial groups, the graph lines went straight up when McCain declared “I am not President Bush.” But the experience of the first two debates is that the television audience reacted well to Obama’s demeanor, and their impression of him became more favorable as the debates wore on. That was probably no different at Hofstra.
— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.