Not much of a fighter, after all

For all his valorous rhetoric about being a fighter, John McCain can't really bring himself to deliver knockout punches against Obama. It's as if he pulls his punches and steps back from making the strongest arguments he can. Maybe it's just that he's not a very articulate guy, but you'd think that he would be prepped so that he would have punch short and clear statements to deliver his attacks against Obama. Instead he speaks in these shorthand statements that are fine if you already know the argument, but rather oblique if all you know is what you've heard tonight.

I agree with Noah Pollak on his assessment of McCain's performance tonight.

A losing night for McCain. And worse, a puzzling one. He whiffed more times than a drunk .100 hitter. Opportunities abounded to drive home simple, direct, and perfectly legitimate arguments against Obama: his support for federally-funded and late-term abortions, his mendacity about his tax and health care plans, his associations with America-hating radicals and anti-Semites. He repeatedly tiptoed up to the line, but never quite crossed it. The effect was to discredit such accusations. The back-and-forth about Ayers ended up absolving Obama far more than it incriminated him. If you’re going to bring up Ayers, you better be ready to say something poignant and damaging. Instead, McCain served up Obama a stellar opportunity to make himself look perfectly innocent. And that is exactly what Obama did.

McCain seems temperamentally incapable of hitting Obama hard, either on policy subjects or on personal and political matters, or delivering a coup de grace when the moment is staring him in the face. He jabs reluctantly and can’t get into the role of holding his opponent’s feet to the fire; he seems to fear all the bad things the New York Times will say the next day. McCain was at his most passionate when articulating how it had hurt him when Rep. Lewis compared him to a segregationist politician. That was a good thing to do, but it was not, and will never be, enough.

It's pretty bad when the thing that gets McCain the most passionate is a low attack on his own honor. When the market has gone down over 700 points today, the Asian markets are tanking as the debate goes on, and people are worried about their personal finances, no one really cares all that much about what John Lewis said about McCain. It would be different if Obama had said it. But to come back again and again begging for an apology was just lame and off the target of what anyone else cares about when they tune in to watch the debate.

McCain was better the first third of the debate, but then seemed to lose steam on delivering his message. And Obama never seems to lose his cool so the contrast to McCain is quite stark. If McCain had been able to hit his points home better that would have been fine, but that wasn't what he seems capable of doing.