NEW YORK (AP) — Bob Schieffer's finest moment as debate moderator came on Wednesday when he emulated a basketball referee tossing a jump ball.

The veteran CBS News Washington bureau chief, in charge of the final debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, listed some of the nastiest accusations the two campaigns had thrown at the other to see what they would repeat face to face.

It provoked the most personal and illuminating conversation between the two men, addressing the extent of Obama's association with former 1960s radical Bill Ayers and anger among some supporters that had surfaced at McCain-Palin campaign rallies.

The exchange was also a window into the essential strategy of the two candidates: an aggressive McCain trying to score points while Obama played defense, using what ABC's George Will called Muhammad Ali's famed rope-a-dope strategy of sitting back to let his opponent punch himself out.

Timing had something to do with Wednesday's debate being the best of the three between the presidential candidates, with McCain needing to make a move. Schieffer deserves credit, too, for a smooth and unobtrusive performance. None of the frustrations of previous moderators — Tom Brokaw with a restrictive format, Gwen Ifill with vice presidential candidates blowing by her questions — were evident.

"You have to give credit to Bob Schieffer," said ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, his Sunday morning competitor. "He did a great job guiding the debate, excellent questions, and he had follow-ups so they could really keep the conversation going."

One of Schieffer's best questions was asking the men why the country would be better off if their vice presidential candidate had to become president.

It skillfully addressed the elephant in the room — public questions over whether McCain's choice, Sarah Palin, was qualified. It invited Obama to go on the attack, but he declined. McCain preferred to talk about her as a partner instead of successor.

"By now we've heard all the talking points," Schieffer gently prodded the candidates at the debate's start. "Let's try to tell the people some things they haven't heard."

His initial question on the candidates' economic plans — why is your plan better than your opponent's? — unfortunately allowed McCain and Obama to slip straight into those talking points. Another low point came in asking the candidates to specify what they'd cut to deal with the budget deficit; the candidates adeptly skirted the question in a previous debate and did so again on Wednesday.

Yet for most of the evening he had a sense of the moment, knowing when to let the men talk and picking the right time to change the subject.

Schieffer's CBS News scored a post-debate coup by finding Joseph Wurzelbacher, the Ohio plumber who was the invisible fourth man on the stage, for an interview with Katie Couric. Time forced her to awkwardly cut him off, however, and invite viewers to listen for more on a Webcast.

Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren noted during her analysis that it was a debate that made reporters happy because it had some real action. It spilled over to the CNN set when the inevitable finally happened: The crowded stage of commentators was so riled up that they were trying to shout each other down.

In the end, it felt like a beach vacation with pundits talking about whether the tide had changed. The general conclusion: McCain did well, even scoring the night's most quotable line when he said he wasn't George Bush, but the tide's going out for him.

"It seems unlikely that anything we heard tonight really did move the needle," NBC's Tom Brokaw said.

CNN's "flash poll" of viewers judged Obama the winner by 58 percent to 31 percent.

"If Ronald Reagan himself had been in McCain's chair, there was nothing he could have done to have won, not on a day the markets went down by 700 points," said Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer.