Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- You'd hope a process that we've had 40 years to improve would be better than our presidential debates. We've tweaked around the edges, and one moderator beats a panel of them. Bob Schieffer did a superior job and was persistent at Wednesday night's debate. Yet no moderator is ever going to get the candidates to talk to each other, much less look one another in the eye.

Why not no moderator? It worked for the Lincoln-Douglas debates, where people stood in the hot sun for hours to listen.

The most dispiriting thing to come out of the debate was the morning after. I woke to see Joe Wurzelbacher's street in Holland, Ohio, lit up like Times Square with network and cable satellite trucks clogging the place.

I thought the press was beyond 23 mentions of Joe the Plumber by one candidate and three by the other, while Asian markets were dropping 10 percent and the Dow has been diving.

Unless he starts making courtesy calls to fix the running toilets of the journalists making him famous, let's relegate Joe the Plumber back to the playroom with Bob the Builder or the 15- minute hall of fame with Harry and Louise and Ross Perot's crazy aunt in the attic.

Here's the reason for Joe: McCain has no argument left except that no one should have to pay taxes, and that Obama isn't one of us.

Distasteful Tactics

He gave up the experience argument by choosing Sarah Palin. By his own admission, McCain was never on top of the economy, and his performance since the financial crisis began, lurching from one pronouncement to another, proved his self-assessment right.

What McCain has instead are the distasteful tactics pressed on him by his consultants, the very ones who defamed him in his 2000 race for the presidency.

That's where ``Obama is palling around with terrorists'' comes from. It's why in the final debate, more time was spent on a radical bomb-thrower from the '60s, William Ayers, than Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his so-far-unsuccessful attempts to stop a market meltdown.

At first, I thought McCain was going to drop Ayers when he said he didn't care about ``an old, washed-up terrorist.'' Then he pivoted and demanded to know ``the full extent'' of his relationship with Obama.

Happy to Oblige

Obama was happy to oblige. Ayers, who committed his violent acts when Obama was a boy, is not and never has been involved in his campaign. Obama condemned his ``despicable acts'' and pointed out that he once served on a board with Ayers that was filled with Republican luminaries and funded by another one, Walter Annenberg. Thanks to McCain, Obama got to explain that before 30 million people.

McCain also gave Obama a chance to answer another charge. McCain is trying to make an oak out of Acorn, a community- organizing group that runs voter-registration drives. McCain said Acorn was about to perpetrate the biggest voter fraud in history, ``destroying the fabric of democracy.''

Acorn doesn't register voters; only state officials can do that. The false names collected are easy to spot. It's an urban myth that Donald Duck and Harry Potter end up voting. The ones that slip through are infinitesimal.

Old Hat

Obama explained his prior association. ``I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department'' enforcing the Illinois motor-voter law.

It's old hat for Republicans to cry voter fraud just the way Democrats cry voter suppression for purged lists, long lines and election-day challenges. If I show up on the list as Margaret B. Carlson but I've since dropped the B and have a driver's license that says Margaret Carlson, I might be turned away.

Most of McCain's anger was non-verbal -- in his tense, coiled body, eye-rolls, sniffing, and forced smiles. He had to know Ayers wasn't going to work. But there comes a moment when a candidate has to fluff up the base or find himself lonely.

Already, McCain has lost the support of some brand-name conservatives with his choice of Palin as a running mate. The latest is author Christopher Buckley, who had to resign from National Review, the magazine his father, William Buckley, founded, for his apostasy.

Following Rush

With Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity attacking Ayers for three weeks, McCain would have been fired by his own party before the election if he'd held back.

I'm not sure he can count on Palin anymore. She told Limbaugh she had nothing to lose, and she's acting like it. She was openly critical of McCain's decision to pull out of Michigan, and insisted that she and her husband would happily campaign there.

She's supposed to wield a hatchet, not throw bombs. The one genuine emotional moment in the debate came when McCain said how saddened he was about Representative John Lewis's reaction to the hateful language at Palin's rallies. Obama agreed that Lewis went too far in coupling McCain with George Wallace, but the rebuke stung.

Only a short time ago, McCain had named Lewis as one of his heroes.

Those writing McCain's obituary (which I'm not; he lost the debates not the election) wrongly say that Palin wins no matter what. The campaign has revealed a petty politician who misused her office, got revenge on her enemies, turned on fellow Republicans when it suited her ambitions, and violated ethics laws by trying to get her brother-in-law fired.

McCain's best chance of winning is by doing what he did when his campaign was pronounced dead last year. Fire people. Drop the cheap shots. Go out on your own and barnstorm the country. Be serious about the broken country President George W. Bush is leaving us. Reclaim the patrimony of the McCains and win -- or lose -- with honor.

(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 17, 2008 00:04 EDT