by Berry Craig

MAYFIELD, Ky. -- “What’s the secret to success in politics?” I once asked the late Paul Simon, the bespectacled, bow-tie senator.

“If people like you, they’ll vote for you,” the Illinois Democrat replied with a grin.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, this year’s Republican presidential hopeful, didn’t look very likeable in his first debate with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate.

McCain scowled a lot. He reminded me of dour Dole in 1996.

Now, I’m an old newspaper reporter who believes in full disclosure. So here goes: I’m voting for Obama.

There, I’ve come clean. But I’m not the only one who thinks Obama won the debate. The polls say most Americans agree with me.

McCain oozed condescension. He hardly even looked at Obama.

Several times, McCain scolded Obama as if he were an upstart, not a senate colleague.

On the other hand, Obama kept cool. He disagreed with McCain without being disagreeable.

Most people -- except the most rabid partisans -- appreciate candidates who are courteous to their opponents. It makes candidates seem, well, likeable.

Likeability served Sen. Simon well. The senator whom Obama called a “dear friend” won election to congress five times before he took on three-term incumbent Sen. Charles Percy in 1984 and beat him.

Simon died in 2003 at age 75. He lived in Makanda, Ill., not far from Paducah, where I teach.

Simon spoke at our community college in 1997. Before the talk, my wife, Melinda, and I took the senator and his spouse, Jeanne, to dinner.

Simon reminisced about the ’84 campaign, recalling a man he said he met on a sidewalk in a ritzy Republican suburb of Chicago. “He said, ‘Sen. Simon, I don’t like your politics,’” Simon explained. “But he also said, ‘I’m going to vote for you because I like you.’”

I doubt McCain has enjoyed many such experiences on the campaign trail.

During the debate, McCain confessed he’s not the senate’s “Miss Congeniality.” If he meant it as a joke, it fell flat.

If he meant it doesn’t matter if a presidential candidate is likeable, he’s wrong. Presidential voters often equate likeability with trust. Seldom do Americans vote for, or trust, sour pusses.

Ask Sen. Bob Dole, the Kansan. Like McCain, he’s from a Red State where a lot of voters are ultra-conservative Republicans. McCain’s haughtiness might play in Phoenix, and Dole’s arrogance might work in Wichita. But Bill Clinton beat Dole, and McCain’s behind in the polls.

Now we’re in what could be our worst economic jam since the Great Depression, which has been caused by the same greed-is-good economic policies that George W. Bush has been giving us for going on eight years.

McCain helped Bush sell the same old Hoover-era snake oil to the American people.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert doesn’t pull punches about Bush and McCain. He says they are among the GOP’s “madmen of the right.”

Herbert calls them “reckless clowns who led us into the foolish multitrillion-dollar debacle in Iraq and who crafted tax policies that enormously benefited millionaires and billionaires while at the same time ran up staggering amounts of government debt. This is the crowd that contributed mightily to the greatest disparities in wealth in the U.S. since the gilded age.”

Herbert adds, “John McCain and his economic main man, Phil (‘this is a mental recession’) Gramm, were right there running with them….Toadying to the rich while sabotaging the interest of working people was always Mr. Gramm’s specialty. He was considered a likely choice to be treasury secretary in a McCain administration until he made his impolitic ‘mental recession’ remark. He also said the U.S. was a ‘nation of whiners.’”

Herbert claims Gramm’s “tone deaf remarks in the midst of severe economic hard times undermined Senator McCain’s convoluted efforts to reinvent himself as some kind of a populist. But they were wholly in keeping with the economic worldviews of conservative Republicans.”

Though conservative “trickle down” economics has failed the country again, McCain rails against liberals. He called Obama one in the debate.

Obama smiled and replied, “John mentioned me being wildly liberal – mostly that’s just me opposing George Bush’s wrong-headed policies.”

When McCain for the umpteenth time styled himself a “maverick,” Obama coolly pointed out that McCain is one of Bush’s biggest boosters. McCain has voted for Bush’s bills nearly 90 percent of the time, according to the non-partisan Congressional Quarterly.

Still, I wish Obama had given us a history lesson. (Okay, I teach history.)

A lot of working class Americans – including many who pack union cards – need to be reminded of what liberal politicians have done for them and what conservative politicians have done to them.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and liberal New Deal Democrats disagreed with the conservative Republican idea of government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. FDR believed government had a duty to help people who need help. So does Obama.

Conservative Republicans fought – and still fight – unions tooth and nail.

McCain votes the union position on bills just 16 percent of the time, according to the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. Obama’s COPE score is 98 percent.

“When you go back and look at history, history will tell you the Democrats ramrodded every meaningful piece of legislation for the benefit of working people,” said Kentucky Labor Secretary J.R. Gray, a former Machinists union official.

They were liberals, too.