Debate Preview: John McCain Will Focus on Barack Obama's Past

In the 1976 movie Network, the angry, suicidal television anchor played by Peter Finch famously urged his viewers to rise up against life's "bullshit" and adopt his rant: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."

Tonight's town-meeting-style presidential debate, which comes after days of some of the ugliest campaigning to date—efforts marked by discredited personal and policy attacks and guilt-by-association tactics—could offer the live audience in Nashville an opportunity to deliver that same message to Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

After all, these are the nominees who early on promised campaigns that would focus on the issues facing Americans and reject the slash-and-burn tactics of personal destruction that have marked recent presidential races. But desperation has a funny way of rejiggering the game plan.

So, with the economy in free-fall, an international monetary crisis unfolding, 45 million-plus Americans struggling without health insurance, and wars being fought on two fronts, voters are being served a rich diet of sleaze and just a smidge of policy on the side. And many are most likely wondering what will be on display tonight, when the audience of largely uncommitted voters picked by the Gallup Organization will ask the candidates questions face to face—no hiding behind a podium with the audience lights dimmed.

With McCain sliding in the polls nationally and in every key battleground state—including his big must-win, Ohio—his campaign in particular has ratcheted up its negative messaging in a last-ditch effort to turn things around in the final weeks before Election Day. Since his widely discredited response to the bailout turmoil on Capitol Hill, McCain's rhetoric and especially that of his running mate, Sarah Palin, have taken on a shrill, divisive tone. Palin, with her trademark wink-and-shiv-in-the-back style, has attempted to inject Obama's controversial former pastor Jeremiah Wright into the conversation—even though McCain earlier had pronounced that line of attack off limits.

And she has become the campaign's point person in its effort to magnify Obama's occasional interactions with anti-Vietnam War radical William Ayers, now a college professor in Chicago, who was a member of a group implicated in more than a dozen domestic bombings in the early 1970s. "Palling around" with terrorists is how she put it. (Her anti-Obama/antimedia/anti-Washington rhetoric has inspired increasingly ugly crowd reactions, best related this morning by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, who reported that at a Florida rally yesterday, one Palin supporter "shouted a racial epithet at an African-American sound man for a network and told him, ‘Sit down, boy.'")

McCain's new tactic has been to raise amorphous questions about Obama's background by asking the question: Who is Obama, really? "For a guy who has authored two memoirs, he's not exactly an open book" is one of McCain's new buzz phrases. Expect to hear it tonight. Obama has responded, characterizing the 72-year-old McCain's behavior as "erratic," and dredging up his role in the 20-year-old Keating Five savings and loan scandal. An ethics investigation cleared McCain of wrongdoing, and he has long apologized for his association with the key scandal villain Charles Keating. (It should be noted that McCain and Keating of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan really were "pals": McCain and his family even vacationed at the Keating home in the Bahamas.)

McCain has the most to lose—or gain—tonight. His campaign has been grasping at seemingly day-to-day gambits to change his trajectory in the polls, even suggesting that they will somehow try to "turn the page" on the economy at a time when each day brings more devastating news to American homeowners, workers, and investors. McCain, who always relished the give-and-take of town-hall meetings, needs to revive his now damaged brand of a happy campaign warrior, ready to lead and ready to reach across the aisle for solutions. The new McCain has become someone many voters no longer recognize—and he's written more memoirs than Obama.

In many ways, what happens at Belmont University tonight will be up to the audience and the dozen or so questioners, including moderator Tom Brokaw, who will serve as surrogates for the rest of the country's curious and restive voters. Will they do as Finch's Howard Beale urges and demand that the candidates cut through the B.S.? After all, in the movie, it made for great television—and reinvigorated Beale's career, though perhaps not as he may have imagined. Tonight, it could actually serve the public.