Jon Cummings: Why am I so bummed that the debate season is over? Please, Barack, take McCain up on his pleas for a dozen more town halls! I know, I know – these three presidential rumbles have been repetitive at times, excruciating at others. But you gotta admit, there’s a certain entertainment value in watching John McCain implode over the course of 90 minutes, again and again and again.

And I want to meet more archetypal Americans like Joe the Plumber … who suddenly finds himself the center of attention because he sits on the cusp of Obama’s under-$250,000 tax cut. Wow – I knew plumbers overcharge, but do they really make 250 large in a year? Cripes! Maybe Sarah Palin needs to replace “Joe Sixpack” with “Joe Chambord.” If there could only be one more debate, maybe McCain could lament the plight of “Cindy the Beer Distributor” who’s overburdened with employer-provided-health-care costs.

McCain obviously was trying to turn Joe the Plumber into an everyman, but he went to the well too many times and poor Joe morphed into a caricature. As did McCain, to a large extent. To his credit, he did get off the good line about how if Obama wanted to run against George Bush, “you should have run four years ago.” But where was that well-scripted line in the first debate, when it might have done McCain a shred of good?

It was the best shot McCain had in his arsenal, and he got it out of the way 15 minutes into the debate; after that he flailed about like Palin trying to shoot down Vladimir Putin from a helicopter (isn’t that the way that story went?). Veering wildly from topic to topic within a paragraph (or even a sentence), he reached his moment of greatest derangement when he concluded a response that was ostensibly about Colombian trade (that major driver of the American economy) by bringing up, within the space of 30 seconds, “talking without preconditions to Hugo Chavez,” raising taxes, and Herbert Hoover. (more…)