Down the Stretch

by Scott Feldman

Did you catch the final presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain from Hofstra University? I don't know about you, but I thought it was the best of the three. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the candidates were seated and close to each other, not standing stifly at a podium or wandering around the room as they did in the town hall setting for the second debate. Aside from the heated and sometimes testy exchanges on a wide range of domestic issues, what struck me was how intent John McCain was, and will be, for the remainder of the campaign, to try and seperate himself from President Bush. As he put it to Barack Obama, "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush you should have run four years ago. I'm going to give a new direction to this economy in this country." But Obama's game plan as I see it, is to continue from now until election day to try and tie McCain to W. and the past eight years. His message to voters about McCain, as we heard him say at Hofstra, "If I've occassionally mistaken your policies for George Bush's policies, it's because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people, on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities, you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush." As of this writing, it's 17 days until Long Islanders decide who gets to move into the White House for the next four years. It should be quite a stretch run.