Even if John McCain had stripped down to his underpants, spat out his dentures, and challenged Barack Obama to a mano-a-boyo in the car park outside, he couldn’t have fought much harder than he did last night.

The American people are hurtin’, he growled. The American people are angry.

You got the feeling that John McCain was hurting, too. And that he was angry. Very, very angry. Who could blame him? These days, John McCain’s poll numbers are enough to make the Dow Jones Industrial Average seem practically healthy.

And doggonit, at some points the old McCain dreadnought almost blasted Obama’s USS Certain Victory clean out of the water.

Almost. If only he hadn’t seethed quite so visibly. If only he hadn’t looked so stiff and contemptuous as he scribbled notes while Obama spoke. If only the man didn’t look as though he pre-dated the Iron Age.

But McCain’s dwindling band of supporters must have enjoyed at least some of last night’s third and final presidential debate, which was by far the most revealing and robust of the contests, helped greatly by a moderator—the 40-year veteran CBS anchor Bob Schieffer—who asked blunt and uncomfortable questions that didn’t allow the candidates to simply recite pre-written campaign platitudes.

The gravitas was intensified by having the candidates and the moderator seated at a heavy semi-circular table—instead of them pacing around a red carpet like B-listers at a product launch.

McCain got into the spirit of things faster than Obama, and thus scored a few early victories that were enough to make you sit upright in your chair. Like when Obama launched into one of his McCain-equals-Bush set pieces, allowing McCain to deliver one of the most heartfelt and effective line of his entire 2008 presidential campaign: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you had wanted to run against President Bush, you should have done that four years ago.”

On CNN, the chart at the bottom of the screen that monitors voter approval began to spike like a seismograph during an earthquake. This was McCain Version 1.0. This was the McCain who independent American voters used to dream about when they went to bed at night, before the software upgrade to McCain Version 2.0, which no-one was familar with, and then to McCain Version 2.1, which was more prone to crashes than the operating system of a 3G iPhone. (Not to mention that McCain Version 2.1 came bundled with a unreliable third-party accessory: the Sarah Palin widget.)

From a purely tactical point of view, the old man outmaneuvered his young nemesis for pretty much the entire first half of the debate—in part thanks to the McCain camp’s unlikely new working class hero, ‘Joe the Plumber’.

For those who didn’t read Wednesday’s New York Post, Joe the Plumber is a man who worked 12-hour shifts for years and is now about to buy his own small plumbing business, which will take his earnings to more than $250,000—thus making him a target of Obama’s plan to tax the wealthy. At a campaign event this week, Obama told Joe the Plumber that higher taxes would allow the US President to ‘spread the wealth around’.

To conservatives, this was akin to flying a red flag on the roof of the White House.

At first, McCain’s references to Joe the Plumber sounded ridiculous—this, after all, is bloke tucking away a quarter of a million of dollars a year from people whose living rooms are knee-deep in sewage. But then Obama rose to the bait, suddenly defending his tax policy with a reference to “my friend and supporter [the billionaire investor] Warren Buffett”. McCain scoffed: “This is Joe the Plumber we’re talking about!”

And lo, at that moment the black candidate raised by a single mother somehow looked aloof and pretentious while sitting next to the blue-blooded admiral’s son with seven homes.

McCain kept this up for a while, and Obama tried to ride out the attacks with his trademark coolness. “No more drama, Vote Obama,” as the bumper stickers say.

But coolness wasn’t an option when McCain kept sarcastically praising his rival’s ‘eloquence’ then pointing out the bits that he claimed had been glossed over in the sales pitch.

“Notice how he keeps saying we need to spend more?” smirked McCain, who never gave up trying to portray the Democrat as a tax-and-spender.

In the end, however, the sheer nastiness of McCain’s demeanor seemed to get the better of him, especially when he said that “I regret some of the negative aspects of both campaigns” then moments later tried to set a racial trap for Obama by declaring how hurt he had been by allegations from one of the Democrat's supporters that rhetoric at McCain/Palin rallies was reminiscent of the segregationist George Wallace.

Obama reminded McCain that TV coverage of those rallies had clearly captured members of the crowd shouting out ‘terrorist’ and ‘kill him’ when the Democratic nominee's name was mentioned.

It was an ugly, tense, bitter moment, that did neither candidate any favours.

But while Obama went on to lighten his tone, McCain did not. And as McCain’s accusations against Obama became ever-more sensationalist—including a charge that the Democratic nominee would favour denying medical treatment to infants—the junior Senator from Illinois simply adopted a tone of humoured puzzlement at the craziness of the old warhorse beside him. And he smiled.

It seemed to work—as it has done since Obama embarked on his remarkable campaign two years ago.

But McCain had drawn blood, and both men knew it. And there’s still three weeks to go.

Times Recommends

• Fish and chip shops ‘selling cobbler as cod’
• T in the Park festival at Kinross
• Body Watch