No Traction for McCain on the High Road

By all measures, Barack Obama won by a wide margin tonight's debate, which was focused on issues, with no mention of Sarah Palin or the smears she has been spreading out on the McCain campaign's low road.

For the first hour, the Republican candidate's demeanor consisted of an odd Uriah Heep cringe with a cajoling, almost imploring tone suggesting that McCain was trying very hard to project sincerity in his prescriptions for the economy. Only in the final thirty minutes, in the segment on foreign policy, did he stand tall and sound confidently presidential.

Once again, as in his refusal to look at or address Obama directly in the first debate, there was a dismissive attitude, reflected in his finger-pointing reference to "that one" as he criticized Obama's vote on an energy bill.

Substantively, Obama was crisp and responsive in outlining what he would do about the economy, but seemed more defensive than he needed to be in countering McCain's charges that his statements on Pakistan reflected inexperience.

But the net effect tonight was to reinforce Obama's image as presidential and forward-looking while underscoring McCain's age and the weight of the Bush years that he is carrying in the campaign.

In a pre-debate CNN poll today, 55 percent of registered voters said that Obama "cares more about people like you," while 35 percent said McCain cares more than Obama. On the question of who has a clearer plan to solve the country's problems, Obama held a 15-point lead over McCain, 48 to 33 percent.

When it was over, Obama's advantage in the CNN instant polling had widened on the crucial questions of leadership.

Tomorrow, McCain and Palin will be back out on the low road, dispensing more of the dirt of the last week, but voters worried about their jobs and their homes are not likely to want to wallow in it.

Obama, McCain and a Romantic Memory

The presidential candidates will be facing off tomorrow night in a place that holds a special place in my heart, Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee

In the summer of 1943, I was scheduled to board a ship for North Africa as a foot soldier. Days later I was in a dorm at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, plucked out of a war movie into an MGM musical on a picture-book campus.

Needing weathermen and translators for the coming invasion of Europe, the Army had decided to manufacture some. I was sent to be trained as a meteorologist.

For the next months there were beautiful coeds, math classes, beautiful coeds, science classes and beautiful coeds. Two dozen of us in uniform lived on manicured grounds among hundreds of women and a few 4Fs, and nearby there was Ward-Belmont, then a junior college filled with rich girls who put on pretty dresses for patriotic Saturday night dances with the servicemen.

At the first one I met her. Joan from Waukegan, Illinois was, like me, away from home for the first time, but she was like no other girl I had ever known, so lovely that when I put my arm around her and she touched the back of my neck, I forgot how to breathe or move. We danced and talked and, by the end of the evening, were planning to meet every Saturday and whenever on weeknights she could slip out of her finishing-school fortress.

We held hands and shared chaste kisses and muted desire. I was James Stewart singing “You’d be so easy to love” to Eleanor Powell. I was poor Gatsby smitten forever by the unattainable Daisy. We talked and talked in a wondrous haze. For a few months, I lived in a romantic movie of my life, knowing the house lights would have to come up sometime.

Before she was to go home for the holidays, there was a formal dance. Someone told me about corsages and, finding myself broke, I stayed up all night doing a classmate’s guard duty to earn enough for a spray of gardenias, chosen when the florist told me white would go with any color.

At the dance, Joan pinned them to her shoulder strap, and I spent the next hours in a delirium of body warmth and overpowering sweetness. By the time we kissed and kissed our farewells, I was left in a gardenia haze that would stay with me always.

While she was away, the college dream abruptly ended. The Army, now needing more foot soldiers than meteorologists, ordered us to pack and prepare to ship out. I went off to fight a war in Europe and never saw my dream girl again.

But when Barack Obama and John McCain face off tomorrow night on the campus where we met and danced, memories will come flooding back of a time when, even in war, life was so much simpler and sweeter.