“Six months ago, I believed I had a sense of Barack Obama's character and John McCain's character. I don't anymore.”
In Focus
, not on issues explored by thoughtful men, but on the relative capacity of the two candidates to perform under television stress."

By Edward Luce in Columbus, Ohio At the end of the primaries in June, John McCain invited Barack Obama to participate in ten town hall debates and was

Had I been in Tom Brokaw's spot for Tuesday night's debate (see my colleague Mike McGough's post on Brokaw's eccentric moderating style), I hope I would have found a way to let John McCain elaborate on his breathtaking proposal to have the feds buy up troubled mortgages. I say "breathtaking" because it's a very big idea that seemed to come out of nowhere. It's also political dynamite, and it's not clear to me who might be hurt by the explosion.
A more emotional candidate than Obama, McCain has done a better job recognizing and reflecting the grass-roots anger generated by the $700 billion rescue plan for the financial industry. By proposing to spend about $300 billion of