Tonight (Tues., Oct. 7), the second presidential debate between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain will take place with four weeks before Election Day. It will be the only joint town hall that the two candidates are scheduled to hold. The event at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., is being moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw and will include questions on both foreign and domestic policy raised by the audience and voters participating through the Internet.
But the candidates are likely to go after each other on character issues, which McCain’s team has forcefully re-injected into the campaign since the weekend.
GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has raised Obama’s ties to 1960s-era radical William Ayers and to the Democrat’s former pastor, the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In New Mexico on Monday, McCain himself asked, “Who is the real Sen. Obama?”
Obama retorted in North Carolina that McCain was engaging “in the usual political shenanigans and smear tactics” to distract from economic issues, even as his campaign rolled out a video recounting McCain’s involvement in the 1980s Keating Five savings and loan scandal in which the Senate Ethics Committee criticized his “poor judgment.”
The newest TV ad from the Obama campaign plays up widespread reports that McCain’s focus on the Democrat’s past associations is an effort to turn the discussion away from the economy. “As Americans lose their jobs, homes and savings, it’s time for a president who’ll change the economy, not change the subject,” says the ad released Tuesday.
The town hall is McCain’s signature — one way he built his “Straight Talk” reputation by interacting with voters in the 2000 campaign and then pulled himself out of single digits to win this year’s Republican primary. Since he won the nomination, however, the audiences for these events have needed to get tickets and have not been the come-one-come-all events of the primaries.
Obama has used the town hall format sporadically throughout his campaign, but not recently.
Instead the Democratic nominee has carefully protected his lead with a highly scripted campaign style ever since an off-the-cuff line blew up into a false controversy four weeks ago. Ever since, he’s been exclusively sticking to rallies and speeches with a TelePrompTer almost always feeding him prepared text to read.
Obama’s last town hall was on Sept. 12 — three days after he went on a riff about how McCain is talking about change when he’s really just like President Bush and concluded, “You can put lipstick on a pig.”
Obama hadn’t even mentioned McCain running mate Sarah Palin before using the line, but the McCain campaign argued it was a clear reference to her signature line during her nomination acceptance speech the week before, when she said the only difference between hockey moms like her and a pit bull is lipstick.
But a town hall debate is not the same as a town hall campaign event — McCain will be sharing the stage with Obama, and his every word will be parsed.
Information from the Associated Press contributed to this report.
