The final debate offers sharper exchanges and grins

Last night brought us the closest things voters have seen this presidential campaign season to a real debate. The exchanges were sometimes sharp and often pointed. John McCain took the offensive, accusing Barack Obama of wanting to raise taxes, of having clandestine relationships with aging radicals and of being dishonest. Most of these accusations don't seem to be resonating with voters; they sound contrived, trite and hackneyed. Perhaps McCain's most effective jab had to do with Obama's reversal of his commitment to use public financing for his general election campaign. Able to raise millions more in private donations, Obama decided to renege on his earlier vow to use public financing — a procedure he has championed — and overwhelm the less-well-funded McCain campaign. Obama had no real rebuttal for the charges.

But Obama remained cool and unflustered throughout the debate. He looked confident and presidential. In contrast, McCain often looked agitated, even angry, as he lashed out at Obama, who was sitting just an arm's length away. Obama, who responded with a bemused grin several times during McCain's verbal attacks, risked committing Al Gore's exasperated and audible sighs from the 2000 presidential debates. Those sighs, meant to repudiate George W. Bush's comments, cast Gore as sophistic and arrogant. Obama's bemused grin was not as negative as Gore's sighs, but it could come across as arrogance.

McCain might have come out ahead in this final debate, but not by much, if any.

But let's go back to a little-commented-upon moment in the vice presidential debate. In discussing judicial appointments, Joe Biden bragged that he initiated a new era in judicial appointments when he opposed Judge Robert Bork's nomination in 1987, not because Bork was not qualified, not because he was inexperienced or unprepared but because Biden disagreed with the nominee's judicial philosophy.

In citing Bork, Biden opened a Pandora's Box that Sarah "You Betcha" Palin failed to exploit. The Bork reference seemed to go right over her head. Did she not know who Bork is? Was she too young to remember the "Borking" of President Reagan's Supreme Court nominee? Whatever, the reason, Palin let Biden get away with his boast about what he had done to alter judicial nominations forever.

A sharper debater would have challenged Biden's boast. "Bork" has become a verb (included in the Oxford English Dictionary) that describes the unfair and unreasonable destruction of an appointee for partisan reasons. Had Palin been more aware, she might have pointed out the many references to Biden's hypocrisy as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held hearings on Bork and others. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his autobiography, describes Biden's charm in promising the nominee that he would be nice to him and wouldn't allow any attacks on his character, but when the hearings began and the cameras started rolling, Biden led the personal attacks. Then after the hearings recessed, Biden would be all charm again, excusing his behavior as just what he has to do as chairman, no offense intended, you know.

Biden left himself vulnerable by bragging that he had invented Borking. Maybe he knew that was before Palin's time and she wouldn't know what he was talking about.