The Illinois senator fired back that although McCain sought to portray him as "green behind the ears," his Republican rival was the one "who sang 'bomb, bomb, bomb Iran' [and] called for the annihilation of North Korea. That, I don't think, is an example of speaking softly."
The debate, the second of three scheduled, was fashioned like a town hall meeting, a format in which McCain often thrives. The moderator, NBC's Tom Brokaw, passed along questions submitted via the Internet and called on some of the 80 undecided voters seated on risers at Nashville's Belmont University.
There were supposed to be ground rules -- proscribing how much the candidates could walk around on stage, and forbidding direct engagement. But McCain and Obama ignored them from the start, roaming at will, running over time limits and demanding opportunities to rebut their opponent. Frequently, one could be seen grinning, mirthlessly, while the other attacked.
The contest has taken a sharply negative turn in recent days, as polls showed Obama pulling ahead of McCain in several key states. The McCain campaign cited Obama's association with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his controversial ex-pastor, and William Ayers, a Chicago professor who in the 1960s co-founded the radical Weather Underground. Obama's camp, in turn, invoked McCain's involvement in the 1980s Keating Five savings and loan scandal.
None of those subjects came up Tuesday night. Instead, the candidates rooted many of their criticisms in the economic debacle threatening to bring down the world's financial system. McCain suggested much of the blame rested on Obama's shoulders.
With encouragement from the Democrat "and his cronies," McCain said, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lent money to homeowners who could not afford to repay it. "There were some of us that stood up against this," McCain said. "There were others who took a hike."
Obama accused McCain of vastly overstating both the role the federal institutions played in the crisis, and his own foresight in warning of the dangers. "In fact," he noted, it is McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, who partly owns a lobbying firm that earned a rich retainer from Fannie Mae.
The two men also resumed their argument over taxes. McCain repeatedly accused Obama of favoring a broad-based tax increase that he said would worsen economic growth and penalize small businesses. He quoted Obama as once saying he would forgo raising taxes if economic times were bad. "I've got some news, Sen. Obama," McCain said, facing his rival. "The news is bad. So let's not raise anybody's taxes."
