Hitchens: Give McCain a cup of Ovaltine, no one's sure he can hack it

[The Night Owl]

Hitchens on the debate at Hofstra...

Give McCain a cup of Ovaltine, no one's sure he can hack it
By Christopher Hitchens on Oct 16, 08 09:38 AM in Politics

The absentee at last night’s debate was the figure of “Joe the plumber”; the notional Mr Average – conceivably related to the “Joe Sixpack” who is so beloved of Sarah Palin - of whom Senator John McCain just would not let go. The old man clung to him as if for dear life itself, and missed no opportunity to drag him back into the conversation whenever things appeared to flag. One blogger reported that there were at least three hundred reporters, during the course of the “debate”, driving their vans around in the hope of snagging a face-to-face interview with Joe himself. Not since the dying days of Richard Nixon has the word “plumber” been heard so much.

As the man in front, according to all the polls, Obama had only to be boring and average and make no mistakes in order to preserve his lead. Or such at least must have been the advice of his sage campaign manager David Axelrod. The nominee managed to follow this tedious script and might have suffered for it if John McCain had not looked and sounded, even during his better moments, like a man who ought to be brought his pipe and slippers and perhaps a healing cup of Ovaltine.

He blinked a little too much. He smiled at the wrong times. He referred to “Senator Government” and to Sarah Palin as a “bresh of freth air”. Instead of repeatedly saying “my friends” (someone on his staff must have finally got to him on this) he kept saying “in America’ and “in this country” where the words were superfluous. He referred to “Fannie and Freddie Mae” as if they were some doddering old couple, whereas every American knows by now that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the names of the country’s most notoriously busted savings-and-loan institutions.

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http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/hitchens/2008/10/give-mccain-a-cup-of-ovaltine.html