My take on the third Presidential debate? Again, meh.

For the first 20-30 minutes, McCain was right on target. He was passionate without being condesending, he was aggressive without being angry. And he had his best line of the night when he told Obama "I’m not George Bush. If you wanted to run against George Bush, you should have run four years ago." Good shot. I just wonder though, why is he just using that line now, with less than three week to go? Why didn’t he ust it in the second debate, or the first, or back in early September? Why wait until now to make that claim? Had he used it earlier, and driven the point home over several weeks to two months, he might have been able to blunt Obama’s use of the comparison.

But after those 30 minutes, when McCain started whining about the John Lewis comment, the wheels came off. Not only did he whine "He hurt my widdle feewings, an’ you haven’t apowogized for it" which was bad enough, but then he went BACK to it, at least once.

After this, he just did terribly. I watched it on CNN which had, most of the time, a split screen showing both candidates. What I saw from McCain, when Obama was talking, was eye rolling, crazy-eye blinking all the time, huffing and puffing, awkward smiles, his jaw clenching, in other words, what I saw was a man so angry so pissed off that it took every ounce of his self control not to come over the table and rip Obama’s head off with his bare hands. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but clearly McCain was very angry, and that came out in awkward attempts at humor, contemptuous and condesencing factial expressions and retorts, and he played directly into the ‘angry old guy shouts at cloud’ stereotype.

Appearance-wise, Obama was clearly the winner just because he looked so cool under the circumstances and so calm. Do we really want somebody, like McCain that can barely contain himself when he has to deal with possible insults from Ahmadenijad (sp?) or when he’s so pissed off at Putin he can barely contain himself? That doesn’t look presidential.

Joe The Plumber reference was a good one from McCain, but not 21 times. He used to example so much it’s now become fodder for mockery. And McCain sarcastic "Joe, you’re now rich" comments didn’t help him. Using his fingers to make quotation marks about "for the health of the mother" thing in the abortion issue was dimissive and insulting and hurt him as well. Oh, I’m sure, the far right anti-abortion wingnuts loved it, but they’re already voting for McCain. The independents and undecideds were turned off, I’m sure.

All in all, not much of an exciting debate. It wasn’t Obama’s best debate, but he held on and didn’t make any gaffes and when you’re 7 points in the polls and over 150 votes ahead in the Electoral College, that’s all you have to do. McCain needed to shake things up, reshuffle the deck as I read someone say yesterday morning. Clearly he didn’t do that.

Baring something totally unforseen (a terrorist attack, an Obama "dead girl/live boy" video scenario, something like that) I don’t know what can change the election so drastically in less than three weeks to really changes things. Will it tighten before election day? Certainly. But will it tighten enough? I don’t think so.

My response to the final debate can be summed up in two words: President Obama.

POLT