Reviews of Darth Queeg’s penultimate Big Chance are expectedly mixed.

Hugh Hewitt points out the lone bright spot that McCain absolutely had to point out:

The critical exchange came early, and McCain won it because he has the truth on his side. Obama did not answer McCain’s stinging assault on Obama’s and his party’s complicity in the financial meltdown brought about by Fannie and Freddie. Obama’s statement that “I never supported Fannie Mae” is an invitation to MSM to examine his real relationship with this financial crisis and its prime movers. This exchange needs to be replayed again and again, as does McCain’s comparison of Obama’s tax and protectionism policies with those of Hoover’s.

Unfortunately, McCain absolutely had to do more than just mention the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb once; he had to pound it into the ground at every opportunity. Which, in this case, meant creating opportunities on his own, since Tom Brokaw certainly wasn’t on HIS side. Will he replay this exchange again and again - at least as much as he is the Obama-Ayers connection? He’d damn well better.

Otherwise, even Captain Optimist conceded the remainder of this middle match as a channel-turner. Ensign Ed thought McCain “won on points,” which is a polite way of saying Sailor didn’t land the nad shots he needed to, as evinced by the fact that the Chicago Cherubim did a much better job of maintaining his composure.

J-Ger was a bit more blunt:

Because he’s trailing, we needed to see something different from McCain tonight. It wasn’t a bad night for him, and most of his answers were fine. But there wasn’t anything that any of us are going to remember in a couple of days…

Maybe this is just campaign fatigue on Geraghty’s part, since we political junkies have heard all these talking points ad naseum for going on two years. Or maybe, as I’ve long maintained, John Sith McCain simply does not have the ability or the inclination to deliver the kind and level of debate performance that could make the decisive difference his candidacy needs right now. Even in the townhall format that is supposed to be his forte, and B.O.’s weakness.

Oh, don’t worry, the post-debate reaction wasn’t bereft of homer cheerleading. And Barry wasn’t without his usual rafter of media-ignored gaffes on topics nobody cares about right now. But I still find myself pondering what a series of Fred Thompson debates with Barack Hoover Obama would have looked and sounded like, picturing the effortlessness with which Fred would even now have punctured the Hussein bubble of hype, celebrity, messiahnism, and blaming the GOP for the Democrats’ Financial Logic Bomb. Such would FDT’s Reaganian gravitas have been that he might not have even needed to run a summer ridicule campaign crosshairing B.O.’s empty-suitedness. He’d have made St. Barack look like the “man-child” he really is without even opening his mouth.

Perhaps that explains my declining interest in each successive debate. With Obama not vastly underperforming, McCain has to vastly overperform, and of that he simply is not capable.

And if the debates are his last remaining opportunities to turn this race around….

[cross-posted at ]