John McCain’s campaign has celebrated more resurrections than Jesus Christ. But, it seems the days of rising from the dead are over, at least for the McCain/Palin ticket.
If John McCain’s presidential campaign has succeeded in doing anything it has become abundantly successful in exemplifying his personal history of bad judgment, negligence, and self-imposed importance, i.e. his reference to himself as a “maverick.”
Many of Senator McCain’s antics flew under the radar early in the campaign season. That was during the time when McCain considered the media his base. What happened?
Well, the broadcast media decided to overlook some of his initial gaffes. However, in a world of 24 hour a day coverage and YouTube nothing escapes the eyes of the world. Remember when McCain confused the Shi’a and the Sunni’s while on a mid-Eastern tour? Or, when he confused al-Qaeda with insurgents from Iran? The love fest with the media was still going strong. There was the video clip of McCain singing “Bomb, bomb Iran.” He now explains that as a joke among old veterans. There is no need to complete the list. We all remember those little gaffes. And, for a while the Obama campaign overlooked the screw-ups along with the media.
However, all good things must come to an end. It had to happen in this day and age. Why? Because John McCain still sees the political season as culminating in smoke filled rooms with old men standing around sipping whiskey and hashing out the role of their candidate. That’s the way it used to happen, back in the day.
The Internet was crucial in McCain’s fall into the proverbial rabbit hole. It caught his every gaffe, his every misstatement and it was published for the entire world to see. McCain’s “people” most of whom are still living in the old world of politics did not take advantage of the Internet. In fact, a visit to the McCain site on YouTube is made up of advertisements and a couple of staged speeches. Other than that, a search for McCain leads one to amateur, although quite good, snippets of McCain making one error after another and defending each. The bulk of the clips run no more than 60 seconds. It seems he would have known better with Meg Whitman on his team.
Another key factor in the race for the White House has been that McCain came onto the scene claiming to be able to do everything… I can find bin Laden. I know how. I am suspending my campaign to fix the economy. I am… I am… I can… As McCain sought to convince us that he alone, much like Bush alone, could “fix” everything, most of us looked at the “fix” we are in and it isn’t pretty.
John McCain is facing a fresh round of anger from members of his own party deeply opposed to the Arizona senator’s proposal for the federal government to purchase troubled mortgage loans.
The pointed backlash from several economic conservatives — many of whom already distrust McCain’s commitment to free-market principles — couldn’t come at a worse time for the Republican presidential nominee less than four weeks before Election Day as he stares at a significant deficit in national and state polls.
But at a time when McCain can’t afford to worry about a lack of support from his party’s base, several conservatives are openly criticizing the plan as a flagrant reward for reckless behavior among lenders.
In his effort to steal the Obama/Biden thunder following the Democratic National Convention, McCain made headlines with his selection of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate. The Palin choice was a gamble, but Republicans were willing to stand by as McCain rolled the dice. She brought youth (relatively speaking) and she was a woman (trying to play on the Clinton effect).
John McCain’s descent cannot be blamed on Sarah Palin. It can be blamed on his poor judgment in selecting her, perhaps, but not on her. That was the beginning of the end. John McCain, who can’t remember how many houses he has, believed our economy to be “fundamentally sound.” No one begrudges the McCain’s their wealth or number of residences. But, to say that the economy was “fundamentally sound” when unemployment has been on the rise for months, inflation is eating paychecks at the grocery store and foreclosures are occurring faster than new construction starts… well, that shows us that John McCain has no idea what it is like to live in the America that most of us inhabit. We didn’t need him to be one of us. We needed him to understand us.
John McCain’s rhetoric on the economy went from “fundamentally sound” to “economic crisis” within a period of two hours. Expecting to see McCain react as a reassuring figure before the American public, we were all in for a shock. John McCain seemed to have a meltdown before our very eyes. Every hour or two there was a new twist to his tactics. He suspended his campain, or so he said. He tried to divert the debate. He rushed off to Washington (24 hours later) to “fix” the economy. What seemed like a plan that was about to be approved in the House fell apart once McCain tried to “fix” it.
Well, we all know the story. We have all seen it unfold. And, it is ugly. It’s almost embarrassing, even for a Democrat. John McCain has not shown one iota of reasonable leadership in the past six weeks, in our time of economic crisis. In fact, he has not acted with confidence. He has reacted with sporadic and erratic behavior so inconsistent that it would alarm the residents of an asylum. In fact, today many of his conservative constituents are alarmed by the McCain recommendation for the government to purchase all the bad mortgages.
With no one buying into the McCain rhetoric these days, John McCain and the stock market seem to be on parallel paths… except, the stock market will come back.
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