"It’s the fair and balanced channel. To me, that means that they can say that McCain didn’t win if he didn’t win. And, he didn’t win. He took ineffective potshots with a .22, which Obama handily deflected, when he needed to unload the ordnance from his fighter jet. That’s what I saw."That's pretty much the way I saw it.
McCain not only lost tonight but he's lost the entire race. His fundamental flaw is his failure to handle the "4 more years of failed economic policies" argument of Obama. McCain made a mistake by trying to claim he's different from Bush. I personally would have answered that charge by looking directly at the audience and saying; "President Bush's economic policy has been the proverbial 'Bush Tax Cuts' that you have heard Senator Obama bash for months. There is not a single one of you in the audience who's taxes were not lowered by President Bush. He lowered every single tax bracket. Even the lowest bracket at 15% was lowered to 10% by President Bush. The amount of money you can make before it is even subject to federal taxes was raised by President Bush. It doesn't take an accountant or rocket scientist to realize that it was absolutely impossible for anyone to claim their taxes went up. In fact they all went down.
Senator Obama has very effectively convinced a huge portion of the United States citizenry that anything Bush is bad. Hence, when he says "4 more years of Bush's failed economic policies" the lemmings respond with, "YES, repeal those evil tax cuts. We want to pay more taxes. Raising taxes must be good because Bush is in favor of lowering taxes."
Therefore, they will vote for Obama. It's really pretty simple. I don't care how much people hate President Bush, if you make them look stupid for holding their positions, they are likely to change that position. But instead, McCain has been trying to distance himself from the President hoping against hope that no one would look behind the curtain and notice that the 'R' behind McCain's name looks suspiciously like the 'R' behind the President's name.
Even Lizzy Dole is losing big in North Carolina for crying out loud. I wonder what would happen if Bush spent the next 3 weeks on the stump for Republicans?