Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Meanwhile, McMaverick Has Big Problems

This should be the best of times for John McCain. After all, the presumptive Republican nominee has pretty much gotten a free ride from the news media while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have duked it out, but the septuagenarian's campaign is sprouting problems like zits on the face of a 15-year-old.

To wit:

* His biggest liability is Mister Twenty-Seven Percent, yet George Bush keeps stepping on his lines.

*
His best chance against Obama is to sell himself as a straight-talking maverick, but the record shows that he has been anything but.

*
The organization of his campaign has been so slipshod that he is bleeding top advisors because of their embarrassingly unsavory past and present associations.

*
He has big money problems, as in not having nearly enough himself and his wife's "f*ck you" refusal to release her financial records.

* His recent flip-flop on troop withdrawals from Iraq shows how vulnerable he is on this increasingly unpopular war.

* He keeps undermining himself because of his inability or unwillingness to master the finer points of policy, including the economy and foreign affairs.

* He is being pressured to enlist in the right-wing's sputtering culture war, including blasting the California same-sex marriage decision, and risks further alienating the GOP's lunatic fringe if he does not.

* He could be seriously hurt by an increasingly likely third-party presidential bid.

* He has no coattails, meaning that the many vulnerable Republicans up for re-election are more or less on their own. Then again, that might not be a bad thing considering how problematic this candidacy is.

2 comments:

JudiPhilly said...

And then, of course, there's the age thing. After all, for someone who's running for president, he's really, really, really old. Which raises the question, when is he going to release his medical records?

Shaun Mullen said...

Yo Judy:

Great to hear from you. Word is that McCain will release a report on the state of his health on Friday. The back story is that it has taken quite a while to get this together because it took so long to amass enough "evidence" to prove that he is of sound health. Hmmm.