McCain Presses Obama in Final Debate

•••Senator John McCain used the final debate of the presidential election on Wednesday night to raise persistent and pointed questions about Senator Barack Obama ’s character, judgment and policy prescriptions in a session that was by far the most spirited and combative of their encounters this fall.•••

•••At times showing anger and at others a methodical determination to make all his points, Mr. McCain pressed his Democratic rival on taxes, spending, the tone of the campaign and his association with the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers , using nearly every argument at his disposal in an effort to alter the course of a contest that has increasingly gone Mr. Obama’s way.•••

•••That set the backdrop for one of the sharpest exchanges of the evening, when, in response to Mr. Obama’s statement that Mr. McCain had repeatedly supported Mr. Bush’s economic policies, Mr. McCain fairly leaped out of his chair to say: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”•••

•••But it also put on display the two very different temperaments of the candidates with less than three weeks until Election Day. The lasting image of the night could be the split screen of Mr. Obama, doing his best to maintain his unflappable demeanor under a sometimes withering attack, and Mr. McCain looking coiled, occasionally breathing deeply, apparently in an expression of impatience.•••

•••Seizing on an encounter in Ohio this week with a voter — Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber — who told Mr. Obama that he feared that his tax policies would punish him as a small-business owner, Mr. McCain pressed his attack on Mr. Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal. Mr. Obama’s plan would raise taxes on filers earning more than $250,000 a year, a category that includes some small businesses, but would cut taxes on households earning less than $200,000 a year.•••

•••Coming on a day that the Dow Jones average had one of its worst drops in history, Mr. Schieffer tried something other moderators had failed to do this fall: get the two candidates to enumerate which proposals they would specifically have to postpone or cut in the face of an economic environment that has changed drastically since they first drew up their plans.•••