McCain is frustrated. He thinks he can beat Obama (politicians are pretty confident in their own abilities). But he isn't convinced his campaign can beat Obama's campaign. He knows that his three-month general election head start was largely frittered away. He understands that his campaign has failed to develop an overarching message. Above all, McCain is painfully aware that he is being diminished by his own campaign.
I think we may have come to that moment, that quick turn of events, that encapsulates the fact that there is apparently no limit to the howlers and nonsense that John McCain can throw out and still not generate collective guffaws or even scrutiny from the national political press.
Conservative activists are preparing to do battle with allies of Sen. John McCain in advance of September’s Republican National Convention, hoping to prevent his views on global warming, immigration, stem cell research and campaign finance from becoming enshrined in the party’s official declaration of principles.McCain has not yet signaled the changes he plans to make in the GOP platform, but many conservatives say they fear wholesale revisions could emerge as candidate McCain seeks to put his stamp on a document that currently reflects the policies and principles of President Bush.
Libertarians are tired of Christian evangelicals, who they believe captured the GOP under President Bush. Evangelicals, for their part, are skeptical of McCain, who in 2000 called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance." McCain has tried to make amends, promising to stand firm on abortion and same-sex marriage, and appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, but mistrust runs deep.
In a barely disguised attempt to help elect John McCain, a non-profit group called Vets for Freedom is running TV ads to sell voters on the success of the Surge in Iraq.
Starting with $1.5 million worth on national cable as well as in Michigan, Nevada, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado this week, the commercials don't mention candidates' names but end their pitch with the claim, "We changed strategy in Iraq and the surge worked. Now that’s change you can believe in.”
The enormity of this insult to our intelligence--that dying and bleeding and spending billions in an endless war that should never have been waged is "change" underscores one of the 20th century's most striking achievements: the spreading of a Big Lie through mass communications.-- ROBERT STEIN
Now last I checked, John McCain was still a Senator from Arizona. Yet the last time he actually showed up for his job and voted was April 8th. He is the Senator who has missed the most votes, despite the fact that Senators Obama and Clinton were still deeply involved in a primary battle long after McCain had secured the GOP nomination.-- IAN M. FRIED
I think there are probably techniques that you can use to successfully sell dogshit to people. I'm not sure what those techniques are, but I know that if they exist they will do certain things. First, they'll successfully convince people that what they're buying is not, in fact, dogshit. They'll call it something else. And they'll also have to disguise the trademark smell and overall unappetizing appearance of dogshit. In any case, I'm pretty sure that John McCain's campaign is very busy trying to master these techniques, but I don't think it is going very well.-- BOOMAN
[W]ith record US casualties in Afghanistan in June, a resurgent Taliban, and new reports of Al Qaeda regrouping in northwest Pakistan, Senator McCain is likely to face new questions about his judgment on the one issue – national security – where voters consistently give him higher marks than they do his Democratic rival.
McCain has resisted calls for more troops in Afghanistan and has rejected criticism that the Iraq war is detracting from efforts to secure Afghanistan. He labeled Barack Obama "naive" for saying he'd strike terrorist targets in Pakistan with or without the cooperation of President Pervez Musharraf.
And while McCain vowed more than a year ago to follow Osama bin Laden "to the gates of hell," he has offered few details about how his approach to Al Qaeda might differ from that of the Bush administration.
-- ARIEL SABAR
Advice to Democrats: get ready. The McCain camp is about to enter a new, more professional phase. It won't be the same campaign with these skillful operatives. Some learned from Karl Rove. Some were the most talented operatives from campaigns that fought McCain. The operative words are: experienced, skillful and seasoned.
What Mr. Obama has going for him [his] tailspin is that his opponent seems mortifyingly out-to-lunch. Mr. McCain is a man who aspires to lead the largest economy in the world and yet recently admitted that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, the one modern tool shared by everyone from the post-industrial American work force to Middle Eastern terrorists to Pixar animators. Getting shot down over Vietnam may not be a qualification for president in 2008, but surely a rudimentary facility with a laptop is. What Mr. McCain has going for him is a press corps that often ignores or covers up such embarrassments.
The Republican's digital ignorance is not a function of his age but of his intellectual inflexibility and his isolation from his country’s reality.
-- FRANK RICH
As if expectations for Obama’s convention speech weren’t already ludicriously high, it now looks like he's going to give it in a 75,000-seat football stadium (as opposed to a 20,000-seat basketball arena). Meanwhile, in a bid to further lower expectations, McCain is expected to announce that he’s moving the site of his convention speech from St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center to the lounge at the Holiday Inn out near the airport.
Cartoon by Ted Rall/Universal Press Syndicate
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