Look, John McCain isn’t an epic failure just because I say so. He’s an epic failure by objective standards. How can you possibly lose a debate worse than this?

In politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And by the end of the third and last presidential debate, the undecided voters who had gathered in Denver for Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s focus group were “audibly snickering” at John McCain’s grimaces, eye-bulging, and repeated references to “Joe the Plumber.”

The group of 50 uncommitted voters should have at least been receptive to McCain—Republicans and Independents outnumbered Democrats in the group by almost 4 to 1, and they started the evening with much warmer responses to McCain than to his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. But by the time it was all over, so few of them had declared their support for McCain that there weren’t enough for Greenberg to separate them into a post-debate focus group. Meanwhile, the Obama supporters had to assemble in two different rooms to keep their discussion groups manageable.

Barack Obama was openly laughing at John McCain last night. Undecided, but right-leaning, voters were laughing at John McCain last night. He was awful. Duncan nailed it, with this:

I admit to being quite puzzled by a lot of the instapunditry out there about the debate which seems to agree that at least in the first half McCain did ok. He was horrible. He looked awful and creepy and weird. I don’t think he did all that well in any of the debates (missed most of the first one), but in this one he was truly abysmal.

John McCain was so bad in all three debates that it is kind of hard to choose which debate he lost the worst. Getting killed in a foreign policy debate was humiliating for Mr. Foreign Policy Experience. Getting creamed in a Town Hall Meeting debate was salt in the wounds for Mr. Debate Me in 300 Town Hall Debates. But last night was the worst debate performance I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched way too many of these things.

At this point, I don’t know how much room Obama has to grow his lead, but it’s going to grow. No one wants to be associated with a loser. No one wants to be associated with George Wallace politics, and that is what McCain is doing with these attacks on ACORN. I take those attacks personally because I used to be a county coordinator for ACORN and I know exactly what the organization does. It advocates for poor people. It fights predatory lending. It educates people about their finances. And it registers poor people to vote. It hires ex-felons, which too few people are willing to do. And it, unfortunately, has to fire a lot of low performing people that try to cut corners on their voter registration in order to keep their jobs. ACORN works very hard to make sure that it catches bogus registrations and terminates those that commit registration fraud. Filling out a bogus voter registration for a fictitious person is not voter fraud. It’s just fraud. It’s a fraud committed against their employer, ACORN. When those registrations slip through, and some inevitably do, it is an added hassle for the people in City Hall that have to process voter registrations, but it isn’t voter fraud because no fictitious Mickey Mouse or Tony Romo ever turns up to vote. It wastes resources, but that is the extent of the harm it produces.

I have had to fire people for filling out phony registrations. It’s sad when you have to tell someone that is struggling to keep the lights on in their apartment that they can’t work for you anymore. But you can’t pay someone that won’t do the work and that tries to con you into thinking they’re getting the job done. You can’t let them use you and inconvenience city hall at the same time. But the idea that this is some threat to our institution of democracy is ludicrous and insulting.

If you’ve worked in this environment, in the inner-city, you’ve learned about the dignity and desperation of the people. To see them used like this to make coded-racial attacks against Barack Obama is heartbreaking. It’s great that everyone is laughing at John McCain, but they shouldn’t be laughing. They should be furious.