Flatliner

We are now less than a month from the election of the next President of the United States of America. Each candidate is springing into their final leg in campaigning and last night was finally the opportunity for John McCain to bring the game onto his playing field: the town hall. When asked about his negative campaigning, McCain somehow justified them by stating that he has invited Sen. Obama to do town hall meetings with him, in which Obama has obviously declined. I have to imagine that McCain was rubbing his hands together in utter delight because he was finally getting what he wanted, to take the young senator from Chicago on in a town hall and reveal that he is nothing more than charm and rhetoric. Well now, that moment has come and gone, and what did John McCain do? He flatlined.

Depending on what network you watched the debate on, you may have been privy to watch it on a network that had focus groups charting their responses throughout the debate. The premise is that the voter is given a dial, and if you strongly agree with what a candidate is saying at any given time, you dial it up to 100, but if you are in disagreement, you dial it down to zero. Each time that a response has been given and a new question is being asked, the dial is to be placed at 50 to represent a lack of enthusiasm in any direction. Now I'm not sure if you have ever been in a hospital, or seen an episode of ER or Grey's Anatomy, but when an individual dies, their heart rate monitor goes flat, hence the term, "flatlining". Theoretically, if John McCain's heart was dependant on the reactions of the focus groups, we would be mourning his legacy this very day.

What I noticed by watching the responses of these various focus groups are a few things:

• Voters, at least those undecided, have ceased to believe John McCain. When he made claims that keeping the tax plan of George Bush is best because it keeps small businesses running, therefore creating jobs, people didn't believe him. When he proposed that his healthcare plan is best because it would allow voters the opportunity to choose their own doctors and receive a $5,000 tax credit, people didn't believe him. What I felt was detrimental to him, is when he tried to paint Barack as being too naive to handle foreign threats, people didn't believe him. Now this is apparently his area of expertise, and his one obvious strength against Barack, so when you remove that, and people start to believe that Barack has a better foreign policy stance, John McCain, you have made yourself extremely vulnerable.


• Women voters trust Barack Obama. In terms of economic planning, health care and foreign policies, the women had Barack dialed up to the furthest rating possible. There was no sense that he was being dishonest, misleading, or misinformed.


• Contrary to what was initially believed, men did not respond well to John McCain's tough talk. Calling Barack "that one" and defending his "Bomb bomb bomb Iran" comment as a joke amongst friends lead to his ratings dipping the lowest of any candidate, at any point, the entire night.

Now that we are in the last leg of this Race to the White House, I am very interested to see if John McCain can, at the very least, salvage the rest of his political career, because it is obvious that he has become disenchanted with what the average American wants. If he cannot improve his performance at the upcoming final debate, it appears that his career will suffer a similar fate as that of his performance last night: flatlining.