The Town Hall Debate: What Was McCain Up To?
Did McCain have a strategy? John McCain’s approach to Tuesday night’s town hall debate seemed at odds with the direction his campaign has taken over the last several days, a point I discuss in my column this morning.

I’ve been pondering what McCain might have been up to in focusing more on economics and issue attacks than personal assaults on Barack Obama. Of course, personal attacks would seem out of place at a town hall meeting. But it occurred to me that perhaps McCain knows that his lurching style in the campaign lately has hurt him in the polls. So he sought to use last night’s encounter to portray himself as a calmer presence. He was not trying to use one debate to gain back all the ground he has lost. He had the more modest goal of improving his image and therefore set himself up to make gains as the campaign goes forward.

This, perhaps, is a compassionate reading of McCain’s performance. I was struck that some conservative commentators, including Bill Bennett on CNN, and my NPR colleague and Weekly Standard writer Matt Continetti, felt that McCain had not done what he needed to do and therefore effectively lost the debate. Matt noted that Obama looked more Reaganesque than McCain did, which is a high compliment from a conservative. And it’s true, I think, that Obama’s calm and thoughtful demeanor has been reassuring to many undecided voters. That is certainly what the snap post-debate polls showed.

Obama’s whole debate strategy has been directed toward swing voters, as the indispensible Nate Silver has pointed out on his fivethirtyeight.com Web site. You have the sense that McCain’s advisers are divided on the way forward. Some seem to think that McCain can only win by trashing Obama, while others believe the old, less partisan McCain needs to reappear if he’s to pick up moderate voters he has lost to Obama. Or maybe it’s a classic two step strategy: have McCain look more reasonable while all the attacks are done by surrogates like Sarah Palin and through advertising, direct mail and e-mail.

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