McCain, Is This It?

It’s all bad news for John McCain these days.  His campaign appears to be rudderless (so much for the steady hand on the tiller).  Even the most honest conservative pundits are pointing out the obvious, that Barack Obama — barring the unforeseen — will be the next president.

Krauthammer last week in the Washington Post:

He tempted fate one time too many. After climbing up on his high horse, McCain had to climb down. The crisis unresolved, he showed up at the debate regardless, rather abjectly conceding Obama’s mocking retort that presidential candidates should be able to do “more than one thing at once.” (Although McCain might have pointed out that while he was trying to do two things, Obama was sitting on the sidelines doing one thing only: campaigning.)

You can’t blame McCain. In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool.

In the primary campaign, Obama was cool as in hip. Now Obama is cool as in collected. He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory. He has not at all distinguished himself in this economic crisis — nor, one might add, in any other during his national career — but detachment has served him well. He understands that this election, like the election of 1980, demands only one thing of the challenger: Make yourself acceptable. Once Ronald Reagan convinced America that he was not menacing, he won in a landslide. If Obama convinces the electorate that he is not too exotic or green or unprepared, he wins as well.

When after the Republican convention Obama’s poll numbers momentarily slipped behind McCain’s, panicked Democrats urged him to get mad. He did precisely the opposite. He got calm. He repositioned himself as ordinary, becoming the earnest factory-floor, coffee-shop, union-hall candidate.

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He’s [Obama] been moderate in policy and temper ever since. His one goal: Pass the Reagan ‘80 threshold. Be acceptable, be cool, be reassuring.

Part of reassurance is intellectual. Like Palin, he’s a rookie, but in his 19 months on the national stage he has achieved fluency in areas in which he has no experience. In the foreign policy debate with McCain, as in his July news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama held his own — fluid, familiar and therefore plausibly presidential.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a “second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition — do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he’s got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

That’s Krauthammer, as staunch a conservative as there is, backing into an endorsement of Barack Obamafor president, noting that Obama also has a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, a major compliment.  He’s saying that McCain’s candidacy is deeply flawed, and that Obama is — reluctantly — the better choice.

Now, today, George Will asks, “Are you going to get any better, or is this it?”

In the closing days of his 10-year quest for the presidency, McCain finds it galling that Barack Obama is winning the first serious campaign he has ever run against a Republican. Before Tuesday night’s uneventful event, gall was fueling what might be the McCain-Palin campaign’s closing argument. It is less that Obama has bad ideas than that Obama is a bad person.

This, McCain and his female Sancho Panza say, is demonstrated by bad associations Obama had in Chicago, such as with William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist. But the McCain-Palin charges have come just as the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing it is not paying for. Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts — telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans’ accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama’s Chicago associations seems surreal — or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, “like being savaged by a dead sheep.”

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Tuesday night, McCain, seeking traction in inhospitable economic terrain, said that the $700 billion — perhaps it is $800 billion, or more; one loses track of this fast-moving target — bailout plan is too small. He proposes several hundred billions more for his American Homeownership Resurgence — you cannot have too many surges — Plan. Under it, the government would buy mortgages that homeowners cannot — or perhaps would just rather not — pay, and replace them with cheaper ones. When he proposed this, conservatives participating in MSNBC’s “dial group” wrenched their dials in a wrist-spraining spasm of disapproval.

Still, it may be politically prudent for McCain to throw caution, and billions, to the wind. Obama is competitive in so many states that President Bush carried in 2004 — including Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico — it is not eccentric to think he could win at least 350 of the 538 electoral votes.

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In 1987, on the eve of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s third victory, the head of her Conservative Party told a visiting columnist: “Someday, Labour will win an election. Our job is to hold on until they are sane.” Republicans, winners of seven of the past 10 presidential elections, had better hope they have held on long enough.

It’s hard to overstate just how much conservatives hate McCain’s American Homeownership Resurgence plan.  Malkin (whom I cannot stand) is apoplectic about this plan.

And here is George Will — who does not like McCain’s choice of running mate one bit — talking about electoral landslides for Obama.  It’s nearly all bad news for John McCain as, frankly, it should be.  McCain has run a lackluster campaign that’s really only remarkable in the amount of mud it’s slung and how far into the gutter it’s sunk.

Barack Obama has run a disciplined campaign.  He has appeared presidential.  He’s stuck to the plan he and his advisers laid out before the campaign started.  He stuck to his plan and his message when Democrats (including me) were nervous after the Republican Convention and wanted Obama to go for McCain’s jugular.  Barring something unforeseen, that discipline and rationality is going to carry Obama to the White House in 26 days.

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