Ground Report

The town hall environment will offer the candidates a less formal setting than the first debate. Slate’s John Dickerson says that “in town-hall debates, the questions from the crowd can easily be turned into ‘moments’ that journalists cling to for weeks.” Dickerson recalls the “Ponytail Guy,” who made an appearance at the 1992 debate and railed President George H.W. Bush for “running a mudslinging, character-based campaign” against his inevitable successor, President Bill Clinton.

But Dickerson notes that Obama could be faced with a grilling of his own from Gov. Palin’s “Joe Six Pack,” the term she uses to describe the working-class American she aims to represent as McCain’s running mate.

Viewers should expect a move away from economic discussions tonight, “[i]f Senator John McCain is in fact trying to shift the focus of attention away from his ability to deal with the economy,” writes Kathryn Q. Seelye in the New York Times blog The Caucus. McCain may put most of the emphasis on foreign affairs, as he did in the first debate when he repeatedly “tried to cast Mr. Obama as a naïf, someone who does not understand the complexities of a perilous world.”

McCain will “go negative … albeit carefully,” predicts the New York Daily News, adding that Palin “all but broadcast the strategy [Monday] when she said at a Florida fund-raiser that her message to McCain was he ‘might as well take the gloves off.’”

“Over the top negative attacks and a campaign message that too often seems to be little more than sarcasm and suppressed anger has damaged McCain’s priceless and hard earned “brand” as a different kind of Republican,” argues former McCain campaign adviser Mike Murphy in Time’s Swampland blog. “McCain’s best option now is to ditch the chainsaw and offer a scared and angry country what it badly wants; hope and leadership.”

Obama must use the second debate as an opportunity to win over more white, working class voters, argues Douglas Schoen in The Daily Beast. Obama “fares poorly with voters over the age of 40, working-class voters, and former Hilary Clinton supporters,” Schoen notes, citing a September AP/Yahoo poll. Beyond race, Schoen says, is the inability of this voting group to identify with the seemingly rootless and Ivy League-educated Democratic candidate. Obama “needs to identify himself clearly and unabashedly with fiscal conservatism, as well as traditional lifestyle issues and a commitment to faith and cultural conservatism.”