McCain is losing, and Obama is pulling away. Is that concise enough for you?

Oh, you want to know why, do you? Okay, let me lay it on you.

The Republican nominee was always going to be a huge underdog in this cycle because every historical factor is working against the GOP. We’re at the end of a two-term Republican administration that has become vastly unpopular due to the retiring president’s public relations obtuseness and indifference; a twelve-year run of GOP control of Congress ended only two years ago; the success of our war efforts against al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere combined with the absence of any 9/11 sequels has muted the natural GOP advantage on foreign policy and national security. Throw in the fact that that Republican nominee was going to have a much more difficult time holding and motivating his party’s base supporters, and you had the fixin’s for a Donk landslide, no matter who the other party put up.

However, John McCain and his campaign braintrust proved themselves to be shrewder than I ever gave them credit for. Between Independence Day and mid-September, they undertook two crucial steps that not only closed the gap between Darth Queeg and B.O, but actually lifted him into a small lead.

First, by employing light-hearted ridicule of Obama’s ego and hyped “messiah” image (the “celebrity” angle, the Britney Speares and Paris Hilton spots, etc.), they were able to define The One as precisely what he is: an empty suit whose self-opinion is at stark contrast with his modest intellect and meager experience. Barry’s thin-skinned reactions, to say nothing of his seemingly endless parade of gaffes, only fueled that dynamic.

Second, he simultaneously thrilled the GOP base and made a play for disgruntled Hillarynistas by selecting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. In one fell swoop he locked up and motivated grassroots conservatives (at least vicariously) and further bolstered his appeal to independents by partnering with a fellow “maverick” reformer who also brought to the ticket genuine conservatism and all the charisma and political talent he lacks. A fact that I speculated might make for, shall we say, a lopsided ticket that would throw the man at the top into the deep shade.

Apparently that thought occurred to Team Sith as well, for after the wildly successful launch of Palinmania at the GOP convention, the McCainiacs all but put Governor Palin in solitary confinement with the exception of their two Enemy Media indulgences at the hands of Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. A mode of “communication” guaranteed to deny ‘cuda her ability to follow the Reagan template and talk past the EM directly to the American people. Tellingly, she was completely absent from mainstream media appearances on local and national talk radio programs. No Limbaugh, no Hannity, no Hewitt, no Ingraham, no Medved, no Levin, no Prager, no nothing. Sarah might as well have been on the sides of milk cartons across the country, while the EM was systematically “Quayleizing” her functionally unopposed.

Some unnamed individual supposedly told Bill Kristol that McCain was “unhappy with his staff’s handling of Palin”. What does it say about Maverick that it takes him a full month, in the latter half of which his poll numbers have cratered, to figure out that his best political asset has been not just holstered, but practically bound and gagged? And isn’t it a far more plausible explanation that it was Sailor that did this to Governor Palin because the only reason he picked her was as a sop, a bone, a token to satiate the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal evangelicals he can’t stand but hasn’t a prayer of winning without? Oh, yes, and because she has a second X chromosome?

Look what happened when Sarah was released from the proverbial cone of silence. First Hewitt, then Hannity, and suddenly Palinmania was back. Or, on the other hand, maybe the calculation was that they had to bring her out of mothballs for the veep debate with Joe Biden anyway, and the grumbling on the right about Sailor’s disinclination to “fight” was growing, so like another diamond to Ron White’s spouse, a fresh dose of the ‘cuda would “shut ‘em up”.

Still, McCain was slightly ahead up until three weeks ago. And we all know what financial hypercane hit the country three weeks ago, don’t we? A Wall Street Meltdown that the Arizonan never got out in front of, never defined truthfully before the Dems could smear culpability on Bush, the GOP, conservative free market economics, and therefore McCain. He compounded that folly by absurdly gambling his “reformer/bipartisanist/I can get things done” reputation on the fool’s errand of suspending his campaign to return to Washington to put together a bailout/”rescue” deal on which the Democrats were holding all the cards. They easily ambushed and humiliated him on his “White House summit” idea, then double-crossed the compromise he helped put together a week ago. Now not only do the American people blame McCain and his party for the Democrats’ destruction of the financial sector, but the very core justification of his candidacy has been disemboweled.

And STILL he won’t engage on the origins of the subprime collapse. In God’s Name, WHY?, you ask? Apparently, because placing the blame for this mess where it belongs would be “too partisan“:

Picture the ad:

Barney Frank: “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

Announcer: He rolled the dice, and lost. And now you’re paying the bill.

Instead, these are the ads he’s running:

“What a week,” McCain says into the camera. “Democrats blamed Republicans. Republicans blamed Democrats. We’re the United States of America. It shouldn’t take a crisis to pull us together.”

It is tough to win an election, where the public is asked to choose between two parties, on a theme of “bipartisanship.” “My side is no better than theirs” really isn’t a winning rallying cry one month before an election.

And even if it wouldn’t be too partisan, it would be, you know, really hard to explain:

Americans are furious over the financial mess, and eager to blame somebody. The McCain campaign would be doing the nation a service by spelling out exactly whose bad decisions helped get us into this mess and how.

The excuses given by an unnamed source to U.S. News and World Report will not fly, and Spruiell’s objections are spot-on. I might even be harsher - does McCain want to be president and lead on all issues, or does he just want to handle the easily-explained issues? If John McCain doesn’t feel that the Democrats’ refusal to confront mismanagement of government-backed institutions that gambled and lost, requiring a massive infusion of taxpayer dollars, is worth making an argument about, then you might as well let Obama have the presidency. [emphases added]

Gosh, I could have sworn that’s pretty much what the Sith Master is already doing. Almost as if he’d rather run “an honorable [i.e. weak] campaign” and lose than do whatever it takes to win and save his country from a man who would systematically destroy it. Either that or he’s deliberately taking a dive.

Sorry if this is depressing you - think of it as misery loving company. If you want a bucking-up, you can always surf on over to Captain Optimist for a feeling-of-doom-ectomy. He says that the parallel to this campaign is 1976, only with the opposite result. Why….?:

Because the country cannot afford the greatest gamble in its modern history at this moment in time.

A confrontation with Iran looms and instability in Pakistan grows. The Islamist threat has been beaten back in Iraq, but continues to nurse its fanatical hatreds in many other places, from Waziristan to London. Israel is ringed not with an enemy that wants a state but by two enemies that want Israel to be destroyed.

The world’s financial system is teetering, and the estrangement between the American people and their government has never been this deep in modern times.

The cost of energy has soared and will continue to climb. The entitlement trap has only grown worse in the three years since George Bush asked the Democrats to work with him on Social Security and they said no. The corrupt, self-dealing culture of the Beltway has poisoned the decision-making of many bureaucracies and in ways only the burdened know, and the credibility of the big media is shattered even as their audiences shrink and many of their news rooms come close to shuttering.

So, despite the rapture of college students and the registration of the homeless in Ohio, the common sense of Americans will override curiosity about Barack Obama and infatuation with his celebrity, and trust John McCain to pilot the country for the next four years.

Do you recognize the mentality put on display by Double-H here? I do; it’s the same one I had in 1992, and again in 1996. It’s a not-too-distant cousin to the incredulity of the Democrat woman after the 1972 Nixon landslide who lamented, “How could Tricky Dick have won again? Nobody I know voted for him.” It is a myopic focus on one’s own superlatively informed view of the race and the candidates and an accompanying blindness to any recognition that most other voters are either (1) not nearly as informed and/or (2) don’t care in any case. I remember the same things being said about Clinton in ‘92 as Obama now - “He’s the most radically left-wing major party candidate in history; he’s a draft-dodger; he and his wife had radical associations in their past; the common sense of Americans won’t let them REALLY roll the dice on electing this guy….” etc. And yet, they did - twice.

The difference between 1992, or even 1976, and now is, of course, the economic precipice on which the nation is teeteringly perched. A full blast of Obamanomics (higher taxes, bigger government, tighter money, and neoprotectionism) now will take a recession of undetermined strength and length and turn it into a second Great Depression.

But what is McCain still talking about? Earmarks and “Wall Street greed.” And Obama?:

Taking a jab at the deregulation that the market has undergone during the previous eight years, Obama said that, “They wanted to let the market run free, but instead they let it run wild.”

Bullbleep. It was Dems who wrote regulations requiring mortgage lenders to make ruinously risky loans or face equally ruinous federal fines and penalties, fed those loans into Fannie and Freddie and got rich off the resulting real estate bubble, and all the while RESISTED repeated efforts by McCain and the Bush Administration to rein it in with increased regulatory oversight before it could burst.

But most Americans don’t know this is bullbleep, because Darth Queeg isn’t telling them. And like it or not, he’s the only one that can - if, indeed, even he hasn’t already lost the credibility to do so.

Oh, I suppose the “taking another look” factor could kick in over the remaining month of the campaign. Gerald Ford made up all but one point of a thirty-three point deficit in 1976; Bush41, down by over twenty-five points to Mr. Bill after the ‘92 Donk convention, actually caught Clinton by the Friday before Election Day, only to be dirty-tricked out of one of the greatest comebacks in American political history by the frivilous Iran-Contra re-indictment of Caspar Weinberger, which was thrown out just two weeks later. Even Bob Dole cut his eighteen-point 1996 deficit to Sick Willie in half in the final three weeks of that sad, doomed effort. By contrast, Lord Queeg’s deficit is “only” in the mid to high single digits. And we already have evidence from the summer of how brittle and glass a jaw the Chicago Cherubim sports. I simply question whether Maverick has that kind of gumption in him.

Am I calling the man who survived seven years at the Hanoi Hilton a coward? Not as such; in Nam Lieutenant Commander McCain had to endure unimaginable suffering; over the next four weeks would-be President McCain has to politically inflict it, with skill and ruthlessness. He’s got to be the very thing he most rails against: a hyperpartisan. He’s got to “take off the gloves,” which is to say, stop being “civil” and “comitous” and sock Barry in the balls as many times as he possibly can.

As I say, I don’t think he has that in him. Nor the skill, judging by the fact that Team Sith quit Michigan without bothering to inform the ticket’s vice presidential nominee, who had to find out about it during a Fox News interview and clearly did not agree with the decision. That, gentlebeings, is the stink of a campaign in disarray such that one almost doesn’t need to check the Electoral College map and behold that they’ve fallen behind in seven “red” states over the past three weeks and the “purple” ones have all fallen out of reach.

Can McCain-Palin turn this around? Theoretically. Some Jesuslanders must think it doable, because there are suggestions. But that’ll keep until tomorrow when the bailed-out Dow soars back over eleven thousand - right?

[cross-posted at ]