McCain calls for a "do-over"

By BJ

Do you ever get the feeling sometimes that the Republican Party has been taken over by the editors of The Onion? The Obama campaign has, over the last several weeks, done a fairly good job of painting McCain as being erratic and less-than-dependable in a crisis. In this, McCain himself has been Obama's most significant ally.

McCain's responses, (and the plural is the point), to the economic crisis have been all over the map, and the campaign continued to flail about over the weekend. And now, with only three weeks to go until election day, and tanking in the polls, McCain is apparently going to call for a mulligan.

Bill Kristol, (always wrong, never responsible), leads the charge for McCain to revamp his campaign from the "stupid" attacks Kristol himself called for. To save you the pain of reading through Kristol's column, Tbogg was kind enough to summarize the whole thing:

Since John McCain's campaign to date is totally FUBAR he should just scrap it and start over to demonstrate his sound judgment and steady-handed leadership

And just what is this new "happy warrior" stump speech tack that McCain is about to take?

“The national media has written us off.,” McCain says in excerpts released by the campaign. “Sen. Obama is measuring the drapes and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections and concede defeat in Iraq.

Well, at least he's decided to stop the negativity, eh? I guess he'll leave that to the TV ads.

But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.”

Thanks for the encouragement General Custer. Seriously, you're out making this speech in Virginia and North Carolina, and you sent our VP candidate to West Virginia recently. West Virginia! I don't think Obama is even trying to win that state.

The latest poll from the Washington Post and ABC has Obama up by ten points, improving his favourabilty scores while McCain's are suffering. In short, McCain's odds are looking increasingly long. Near as I can tell, the only real chances for McCain to turn this around are to hope for some externalities like a national security disaster or a great deal of covert racism.

If this is where McCain wanted the race to be, I'm frankly terrified to consider where things would have to be to cause him concern.

Ah well, maybe he has a plan to suspend his campaign again and refuse to participate in the vote on November 4th while there's such a serious economic crisis going on, and that if Obama doesn't follow suit, it will be proof that he's more interested in winning the election than solving America's problems.