Life Support

We're seeing the beginning of the end of the political career of John McCain. The resumes are being shopped and the fingers are being pointed. Maybe it's because we haven't had a real blowout election in the digital age, but this post-mortem, coming 12 days early, is the earliest I've ever seen it. The New York Times Magazine article is particularly brutal, showing practically every wart of this flailing campaign. I think this paragraph, which is kind of a throwaway, said it all.

The campaign was in the throes of an identity crisis by June 24, when a number of senior strategists gathered at 9:30 a.m. in a conference room of McCain’s campaign headquarters in Arlington. As one participant said later, the meeting was convened “because we still couldn’t answer the question, ‘Why elect John McCain?’ ” Considering that the election was less than five months away, this was not a good sign.

On October 23, they still can't answer it. They bounced from one idea to the next and never settled on anything. It was a cynical, superficial campaign designed to win hours of the news cycle instead of a campaign. And this is an incredible passage:

Then for a half-hour or so, the group reviewed names that had been bandied about in the past: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (of Minnesota) and Gov. Charlie Crist (of Florida); the former governors Tom Ridge (Pennsylvania) and Mitt Romney (Massachusetts); Senator Joe Lieberman (Connecticut); and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York). From a branding standpoint, they wondered, what message would each of these candidates send about John McCain? McInturff’s polling data suggested that none of these candidates brought significantly more to the ticket than any other.

“What about Sarah Palin?” Schmidt asked.

What [Davis] liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence. And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”

And this is now his single biggest liability in the campaign.

But more than anything, this part gets to the heart of who John McCain is as a man, why he would be led by the nose and stoop to the basest tactics just to get elected.

The flipside to John McCain’s metanarrative of personal valor has always been palpable self-righteousness. In this campaign, his sense of integrity has been doubly offended. First, an adviser said, “He just really thinks the media is completely in the tank for Obama and doesn’t feel like he’s getting a fair shake at all.” And second, another said, “I don’t think John likes people who try to do jobs they’re not qualified for” — referring, in this case, to Barack Obama.

And this informs the latest gimmick.

John McCain's election night watch party might be missing John McCain. Instead of appearing before a throng of supporters at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix on the evening of Nov. 4, the Republican presidential nominee plans to deliver postelection remarks to a small group of reporters and guests on the hotel's lawn.

Aides said Thursday that the arrangement was due to space limitations and that McCain might drop by the election watch party at some other point.

He's so self-righteous that he doesn't want to face anyone when he loses. He can't imagine that America wouldn't think him worthy of the honor, and so he'd rather wrap himself inside the bubble. This is cowardly.

I predict he resigns from the Senate before the 111th Congress even starts.