David Broder: If Obama Had Done McCain’s Town Hall Debates McCain Wouldn’t Have Had To Go Negative

I reject the premise here, and would say that noting Obama’s myriad of personal and professional connections to fraudsters and extremists is hardly “tawdry” (in the case of Rev. Wright McCain clearly hasn’t gone far enough), but this statement is interesting in what it says about Obama:

[Obama] rejected McCain’s invitation to hold joint town hall meetings — opening the door to the kind of tawdry exchange of charges that we have seen.

What Broder is saying here is that if Obama had debated McCain in the sort of wide-open, town hall-style debates McCain would have done better in the polls and wouldn’t have felt it necessary to go “tawdry” (in Broder’s rather asinine estimation). Which clearly means that Broder didn’t think Obama would have performed well in those debates.
Which isn’t very hard to believe. Obama, when he’s not working from a prepared and rehearsed script or working off of a teleprompter, is a mess. He doesn’t do well in spontaneous situations because it’s hard for him to stay in character during those situations. Because, unlike McCain, Obama isn’t campaigning as the person he really is.
Which isn’t to say that who McCain really is is all that great, but with Obama what we’re getting on the campaign is a carefully crafted stage persona. He’s not really that guy we’ve been seeing on television and hearing on the radio and reading about in our newspapers. He’s a 20-year member in good standing of Rev. Wright’s Church of God Damn America. He’s the beneficiary of Tony Rezko’s political money. He’s an ideological fellow traveler with Saul Alinsky, and the political protege of William Ayers.
Which is why he has to stick to his script so carefully. When he’s diverged, like when he told Joe the Plumber that he wants to “spread the wealth around,” he gets in trouble.