Here's my take on the final McCain-Obama duel, first posted at MotherJones.com....

A political campaign can be like a rock slide. At some point, it's just going to continue in the direction it's heading--and not much can stop it. After the final debate between Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, it may well be that the 2008 presidential contest has reached not the tipping point, but that rock slide point. This is not a prediction of a pro-Obama avalanche on November 4--though that's a possibility. It's merely an observation that the campaign may be done in the sense that there are no major inputs to come (barring a bolt-from-the-blue event) that will affect the final tally. Polls will show that there are still some undecided voters out there. (Who are these people?) But whatever's going to determine this election--economic concerns, a desire for change, racism, you name it--is probably already in place, and the candidates may not be able to alter this, at least not in a proactive manner. Certainly, at any time, either can turn the race upside down by saying or doing something particularly dopey.

Neither got dopey on Wednesday night. McCain even had his best (or his least unsuccessful) debate performance, but it was no--damn, I hate this cliché--game changer. McCain was more aggressive than in the previous face-offs, and he finally dared to challenge Barack Obama directly on the--drum roll, please--Bill Ayers Question. But there was this: viewers watching McCain's reaction shots during the evening could have easily wondered if the Republican presidential nominee would make it to the finish without his head exploding, for he seemed to be in the midst of an exercise in anger control.

Prior to the debate, there was much chatter about whether McCain would play the Ayers card. Judging from video of his recent rallies, it appeared that his base was demanding blood on this front. But polls indicated that these sorts of attacks have been hurting McCain with in-the-middle voters. So he faced a tough decision: ignore Ayers and upset the diehards or accuse Obama of being a pal of a domestic terrorist and alienate the indies.

McCain and his strategists came up with a hybrid approach: take a shot on the Ayers front and combine it with a traditional political assault. "I don't care about an old washed-up terrorist," McCain huffed, but then he went on to say, "we need to know the full extent of that relationship." Huh? If you don't care about Ayers, why do you care about the relationship? And why repeat the false claim that Obama launched his first political campaign within Ayer's living room?

This was essentially McCain's love letter to the GOP base. ("Now get off my case, okay?") More important, he attached it to his true attack of the night: Obama will raise your taxes. After quickly running through his Ayers index cards, McCain noted, "My campaign is about getting this economy back on track...I'm not going to raise taxes the way Senator Obama wants to raise taxes." In what was probably the last big moment of the campaign before Election Day, McCain offered this meta-argument: Obama is a liberal tax-and-spend Democrat, and I'm a conservative. (He left off the Republican part.)

Repeatedly, McCain accused Obama of wanting to throw money at problems and of yearning to raise taxes. When Obama maintained he would give tax breaks to the bottom 95 percent--and more tax relief than McCain would to this large slice of the American public--McCain replied: hey, this guy wants to raise taxes. And, by the way, he wants to spend your money.

Remember when Bill Clinton in 1996 pronounced "the era of big government is over"? Liberals were incensed that a Democratic president would bolstered Conservative Talking Point No. 1 and would accept the fundamental tenet of Reaganism.

Well, it turned out Clinton was sure wrong about that. Today, Big Government is on the march, with a Republican administration spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street and to partially nationalize banks. So while we wait for the final presidential debate of 2008, here's a question to ponder: is Reaganism dead? Short answer: you betcha. From Bloomberg:

Crunch time for McCain? Perhaps--for on Wednesday night at his final debate with Barack Obama, John McCain has a do-or-die decision to make. To Atwater or not to Atwater--that is the question. (If you're too young to get the Atwater reference, look it up.) And whatever his answer is, McCain is poised to disappoint--perhaps alienate--one of two crucial blocs of voters.

The Republican party's base wants blood. They cannot believe that a former community activist (read: Socialist!) with barely a moment's experience in Washington who is a secret Muslim and quasi-Black Panther is close to the presidency. For them, the association game--tying Obama to former, bomb-throwing radical Bill Ayers and extreme-rhetoric-hurling Jeremiah Wright--ought to be a fundamental part of the McCain campaign, for these connections reveal the real Obama. Obama, they contend, is fooling the voting public by coming across as a mainstream, composed, confident politician who reasonably talks of consensus-building and change. In their view, he is both the embodiment of the evils of the 1960s and Islamofascism. A sleeper agent. A Manchurian candidate from Mecca. But he is so skilled at keeping his true loyalties covert, he can only be exposed via his ties to Ayers and Wright. This is not guilt by association or the petty politics of personal destruction. It's the key to decoding Obama. Its what must be done so the Republic does not fall into the hands of an internal enemy.

And it was only a few days ago that McCain and Sarah Palin were on the Ayers trail. She accused Obama of "palling" around with domestic terrorists. (She used the plural.) McCain promised a supporter he would raise this connection at the final debate.

But recent polling has indicated that McCain's attacks on Obama have lost him support among voters. More voters see McCain as the more negative of the two candidates and less concerned with issues than Obama. McCain's assaults are simply not working--especially when tethered to McCain's erratic moves regarding the economic crisis. So if he goes all Ayers (or Wright) on Obama, he faces a real risk: pissing off indie and uncommitted voters. But, then, if he holds his fire on this front, he will anger the die-hard conservatives who want to see him pummel Obama and expose the true Obama to the entire world.

I don't often make political predictions. But I will issues this one: the presidential debate on Tuesday night will show if John McCain has any soul left.

I admit it: I used to be one of those liberal reporters/saps in Washington who fancied McCain in the late 1990s and during his 2000 presidential run. In those days, he was about as enjoyable as a senator came--and about as publicly candid. And it was fun to watch him poke the GOP in the eye on campaign finance reform and tobacco. It's not as if I believed he was worth voting for in a general election; he was still archly conservative in important ways. But he was indeed a different type of Republican and provided entertaining company in the Green Room or on the campaign trail.

Those days are long gone. McCain leveraged his soul at the end of the 2000 campaign at the GOP convention, when he gave a speech sucking up to George W. Bush, whose campaign had maligned him viciously during the primaries. It was as if a switch was flipped, and McCain realized his only true path to greater power was to make nice (generally) with the Republican establishment and the GOP base. It was a calculation with some logic to it, as 2008 proved. But it meant he had to jettison his best parts.

So we're left today with a fellow who still appears to believe he is a straight-talking maverick--when he is actually just another pol who will say practically anything to get elected and who has turned his campaign over to the sort of whatever-it-takes political operatives he once derided.

Look at his speech from Monday. It was chockfull of misrepresentations that are hard not to call lies. From The New York Times' analysis: