The final presidential “debate” is past, and both Barak Obama and John McCain are taking their largely negative campaigns into the home stretch. Interestingly, lots of people are critical of negative campaigning, despite the fact that it tends to work. One of the things I find even more interesting is that while both campaigns are being criticized for “going negative”, there is an important difference between them. Barak Obama has been critical of John McCain’s erratic behavior - since the the unsteady way McCain has conducted himself over the past three weeks speaks to how he’ll likely lead if he is elected President. McCain, on the other hand, has been trying to scare people into seeing Obama as an un-American radical with strong ties to terrorists and a penchant for lying.

The difference between these two sets of negative attacks is that Obama’s attack on McCain is factually true. McCain’s attacks are not.

Over the past weeks and months, we have seen a John McCain all over the map as he tries to regain the lead in a race that is largely going badly for him. His faux suspension of his campaign for two days before the first debate was seen as a desperate hail-mary attempt to shift the focus to his leadership and willingness to put America first in a time of unprecedented economic crisis. When the economic deal his campaign needed didn’t materialize, he claimed victory and restarted his campaign with a “surprise” visit to the first presidential debate. This occurred after McCain’s previous hail-mary selection of a feckless governor of America’s least populated state as his running mate in an attempt to put the conservative Republican base at ease with his candidacy. That’s largely worked, but it hasn’t won him the accolades from women’s groups that he expected, nor has it swayed many Hillary Clinton supporters since many of them vote principles over gender.

For Obama to attack McCain for trotting out weirder and weirder ideas (taxing employee health benefits, anyone?), or flip-flopping on key issues (the fundamentals of the economy are strong one day and the sky’s falling the next) isn’t going negative. It’s calling things how they are.

I often wonder what might have happened if John McCain had successfully grasped his proper moment in history - if he had defeated George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican Primary. McCain was the right Republican for the job eight years ago.

He isn’t anymore.

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