Summary

Archives of political thoughts posted in 2008.

10-09		McCain's Last Stand

Note: The url of each heading and (date) below is a permanent link.

As I've proved many times in the past, I'm kind of lousy at political predictions. I often allow my wishful thinking to ignore unpleasant realities.

For example, I seriously over-estimated the egos of Rudy Guiliani and Fred Thompson when I predicted that even a display of weak support for their Republican nomination candidacies would cause them to ignore their shelf-life expiration dates. I'm also mildly impressed that Mitt Romney turned out to be more of a fiscal conservative than I imagined, at least as far as squandering his children's inheritance.

Given that, I think that we'll find out in the next two/three days how far McCain is willing to go down his current path. He's at the precipice now, looking over campaign rally supporters shouting Treason and Traitor. At some point he is going to figure out that he got punkt

1. by his Rove-tutored campaign manager who convinced him to cash in all of political capital culminating in the Palin pick, and
   
2. by Obama who feinted joining a head-first dive into a bunch of rabbit holes but then pulled back at the last minute.

All that McCain had going for him into this campaign was his reputation. He let himself get talked into sacrificing that for the sake of winning an election on behalf of an ungrateful and suspicious base of Republicans.

So my prediction is that McCain will soon realize he only has three weeks left in the national spotlight, three weeks to salvage his credibility. He doesn't even have a shot of being an opposition leader -- not that he really wants that -- so now all he has to play for is his legacy, his brand. I'm guessing that all of this Ayers crap will disappear from his campaign by the weekend, as he rolls out his last new campaign slogan: Down with Dignity.

-- cbu (10/09/2008)

Copyright (c) 2008  Craig Upright,
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