After crashing his campaign into the mountain with the “suspend the campaign” stunt to “save” the country from the financial mess, finding his deregulated economy crashing down around him and power-hungry Palin giving barely literate interviews to “hard-ball” morning show reporters like Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, John McCain will now have to spend every last drop of his faux “straight talker” legacy in a pathetic attempt to derail Obama in these final days of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
No matter how many of the polls found the country yearning for a more Preisdential and fiscally responsible adult, McCain only has the “angry” right-wing vote left. As boneheads in Republican audiences scream, “Terrorist”, the rest of the country is now loudly voting “No” to the ham-fisted economic team of Angry and Snippy.
As Talking Points Memo Election Central’s ever astute Greg Sargent puts it:
The crisis also forced McCain to suddenly wrench himself into a populist posture — a transformation so ridiculous given his previous statements and pro-deregulatory past that it colored everything that followed. Obama then performed solidly amid the skirmishing in Congress. This, combined with the public’s preference for Obama’s economic solutions over McCain’s, ensured that McCain’s higher “preparedness” numbers didn’t lead voters to see him as best prepared to manage the crisis.
It’s the basic disconnect at the heart of McCain’s claim to being the right candidate to take control of the economy that is really driving him down. In short, McCain lost his “maverick” brand because on the driving issue of the campaign, he isn’t a maverick, and never really was. And thanks to media coverage pulled towards skepticism by the liberal counter-narrative — not to mention the crisis itself — voters know it.
Or as Glenn Greenwald of Salon describes the Republicans’ situation:
This is a dying, desperate movement — so deeply out-of-touch with the country that they actually proclaimed that Sarah Palin would save them in the wake of the debate, only to watch her continue to drag down their ticket. Polls now even show Obama with large leads in traditional red states like Virginia (10-12 points) and North Carolina (6 points). Watch McCain’s speech today and you will see only one thing: the behavior of cornered rats.
After McCain 