McCain goes on the attack in final debate

The McCain campaign stuck to its themes afterward, calling McCain’s aggressive tactics “strong, clear straight talk about setting a new direction for our country.”

“While Barack Obama is measuring the drapes and campaigning against a man not even on the ballot, John McCain demonstrated that he has the experience, judgment, independence and courage to fight for every American,” McCain’s communications director, Jill Hazelbaker, said in a statement.

The Obama campaign countered by condemning what it called McCain’s “angry and negative attacks.”

“We came into the debate with two-thirds of the American people thinking that John McCain is running a negative campaign, and Senator McCain spent 90 minutes trying to convince the other third,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, said in a statement.

With less than three weeks until the Nov. 4 election, the 90-minute debate focusing on the economic crisis comes as polls show Obama with a clear lead nationally and in several key battleground states.

The latest Gallup Poll daily tracking report, which questioned more than 2,300 likely voters nationwide Sunday through Tuesday, showed Obama with a 52 percent-to-44 percent lead. Numerous other polls released this week mirrored those results, all showing Obama with a lead of 3 to 10 percentage points.

McCain was keenly aware of the stakes he faced after two debates in which supporters suggested that he was insufficiently forceful against Obama. Over the weekend, he promised to “whip” Obama’s “you know what.”

McCain first went on the attack, ironically, by accusing Obama of attacking him too strongly. He complained that Obama had not repudiated comments by supporters complaining about the Republican attacks on Obama. McCain intimated that the comments, by Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and other civil rights leaders, were racially motivated.

Obama responded by saying “100 percent” of McCain’s ads had been negative.

“Senator McCain’s own campaign said publicly last week that if we keep talking abut the economic crisis, we [the McCain campaign] lose, so we need to change the subject,” Obama said.

For months, McCain and his campaign have tried to convince voters that Obama is an inveterate tax raiser whose spending priorities on health care and other issues would mean higher taxes on people of all incomes. Obama has said he would raise taxes only on people making more than $250,000 per year.

Heavy-duty response team
But McCain attacked Obama on a variety of issues, saying his opponent had reneged on a promise to accept federal matching funds for his campaign and opposed all offshore oil drilling (Obama has said it offshore drilling was worth studying) and saying Obama had distorted McCain's position on stem-cell research.

McCain complained that Obama had accused him of opposing stem cell research, which he said was not true. He said he favored most research on stem cell projects, opposing only work on cells derived from aborted human embryos.

Asked about their running mates, both candidates said Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden was qualified to become president, but McCain qualified his judgment by adding the words “in many respects.”

McCain passed up a chance to say his own running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was qualified to sit in the Oval Office, although he praised her performance as governor. Obama sidestepped when asked, saying it was up to the voters to decide.

Anticipating a full-bore assault from McCain, the Obama campaign planned to deploy a heavy-duty response team. For the first time, Obama’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, was expected to be at the debate site to answer McCain’s charges on Obama’s behalf, aides told NBC News.

Obama’s campaign also has taken some shots at McCain. In an internal memo sent to reporters by mistake Wednesday, senior campaign officials said their main message after the debate would be that “John McCain has been erratic and unsteady since this crisis began — staggering from position to position and trying to change the subject away from the economy by launching false character attacks."

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