My favorite development of this political cycle is the unmasking of almost all Republican election dogma as either wrong on its face or only useful when other factors are tilting the race in the Republicans' favor.

For example: Bill Kristol has taken every side of the "What should McCain do?" argument, and he's been wrong every step of the way. All the old lines about how to win -- cribbed from Rove, who was also almost always overstating his own cognition -- are failing now, precisely because elections are usually about something other than the two people involved.

In 2004 the election was about war and the threat of domestic terrorism, and that's what Bush used to defeat Kerry. It wasn't that Bush was strong or Rove was smart, or that Kerry was weak, etc. It was this giant consuming issue of fear, and how Bush exploited that issue, that was determinative.

This year -- oops! -- the big issue is how completely screwed up the country is thanks to Republicans like George W. Bush. And -- oops! -- John McCain is a Republican. Even though he tried to be an anti-Republican maverich, he -- oops! -- is still a Republican, and VOTERS DON'T TRUST REPUBLICANS ANY MORE.

Which means this is the math in the current political context:

Republicans = Liars.

McCain says Obama can't be trusted = Obama CAN be trusted.

Heh.

The other thing in that poll is that Palin's unfavorables were very high (46) and the net was -15. I don't think that should be overlooked as a factor in the general sentiment expressed in this poll that attributes a great deal of negativity to the McCain campaign. I tend to doubt that Obama is really 14 points ahead at this time but its pretty clear he has a big lead.

An incoherent campaign, led by an incompetent candidate, based on an untenable ideology. What could possibly go wrong?

He's stuck in a tar pit of negativity. His economic plan surely will not be well-received, and he won't do well enough in the debate tonight to make a dent in Obama's lead. He'll be forced to go negative again. Its all he has Sarah Palin told Limbaugh that she has "nothing to lose." At this point she doesn't expect to win, but she wants to cause as much damage as possible. His campaign is in an out of control downward spiral. He's lurching aimlessly, Palin has her own agenda, his managers are steering him in a bad direction.

I'm hoping he performs so poorly tonight that the next few weeks are merely an epiloge.

While I'm delighted and relieved that it looks like Republicans will be kicked out of the White House in November, I still wish McCain was a better advocate for the Republican policies. As things stand now, Republicans will be able to claim that the loss was McCain's fault for running a lousy campaign, and that Americans still support their ideas.

What the country needs from this election is an unequivocal repudiation of the conservative agenda. We need to drive a stake through the heart of the fraud that is "supply-side economics" and we need to destroy the myth of the "free market".

If Obama is able to win, in spite of voter machine fraud and massive Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout, then part of his mission must be to publicly repudiate the previous eight years. He will need to resist calls to "turn the page on the past" and not only announce and implement new policies, he needs to continually explain why the old policies failed.

Bipartisanship is a wonderful goal, but when your house is on fire you can't take time arguing with someone who argues that the smoke and flames don't exist, and you can't find a middle ground with someone who argues that pouring gasoline on your house will make things better.

How about this as a slogan for an (hypothetical) Obama presidency -- "Purge, then surge."

I agree with SteveT, but I don't think that GOP policies can possibly come out of this intact.
I kind of hope that McCain goes openly negative in tonight's debate, allowing Obama to refute him without raising the issue himself. Maybe the moderator will force them to discuss dirty campaigning, which would be great. If McFeign gets into that territory on national TV, it will hurt him. If he tries to debate the issues, he will gain little ground even if he does unexpectedly well. Win -win for Barack.

It wasn't too long ago that a McCain campaign staffer told a reporter that the Republicans would lose if they focused on the economy. The campaign got it backwards.

I don't think it was so much that the staffer got it backwards; it's that the staffer kept talking when he should have simply said, "Republicans will lose."

Seriously--does anyone believe that McCain sans Ayers/ACORN would be in a significantly better position now?

Richard Greenslade said:
I agree with SteveT, but I don't think that GOP policies can possibly come out of this intact.

And yet, when McCain suggested yesterday that the solution to the credit crisis was to cut capital gains taxes, nobody laughed in his face.

I hope that in Obama's (hypothetical) Inaugural address, he proposes some basic principles that will guide his policies -- like in America If you work hard and honestly at a full time job, you should able to support a family, and if two people work hard and honestly at full time jobs, their family should be able to thrive; and if that's not the case, then the policies we've been pursuing have to change.

Let's face it. McCain is pretty much toast and everyone knows it.

He has only the slimmest of chances to turn things around. Far be it from me to offer advice to McCain, but if he can't orchestrate the capture of Bin Laden, he's going to have to do something extreme. I suggest he cut the bull and be brutally honest about himself, the republican party, and the country. Even this probably won't work (the last guy who tried the honesty approach lost 49 states), but it sure would be interesting to watch.

The honesty approach would undoubtedly offend "the base", because they are so much of the problem and McCain knows this.

Gee, who wouldn't want four more years of cultural war and 60's bitterness?
(Even George Will has gotten over hippie chicks laughing at his ties.)

This is what happens when you go from one McKlan rally to another in the "Hate Talk Express." Everything the McCain campaign has done is so, so wrong. How could he possibly lead a nation if he can't run a campaign.

One great byproduct of the hate-speech at the Palin/McCain events is that they show in high contrast, just how utterly vacuous and contemptible these ass-faced morons are. Watch them shout that "I read somewhere that Obama is a Ay-rab!" and you'll see exactly how these people operate. They might as well say "I hate black people and an illiterate, racist shut-in from my snake-handling church forwarded me an e-mail that says Obama is a Arab. So I believe it!"

Me? I hate racist assholes. In fact, I'm intolerant of them.

Actually, McCain camp seems to be shifting one more time. The past couple days have been a rerun of the last couple of minutes of McCain's RNC speech. Join with me, fight with, stand up fight, blah, blah, blah.
I'd believe this is the "new" tone if I didn't also know that the pacaderms ALWAYS try to have it both ways. The attacks will continue in earnest.

It wasn't too long ago that a McCain campaign staffer told a reporter that the Republicans would lose if they focused on the economy. The campaign got it backwards.

I don't think so. Republicans were going to lose if they focused on the economy. This time, Republicans were always going to lose.

Their choice was losing with a semblance of grace and dignity or going down as hysterical, hateful, paranoid bigots (I loved someone's comparison of them to caged psychos throwing their own feces). The record will reflect that the latter is the path they chose.

This is what happens when you run a 2008 campaign with a 1988 approach (right down to the attractive, but dimwitted, running mate).

One of the key pieces of brilliance in the Obama campaign has been how they've managed to not only push back on the smear tactics, but make them work in Obama's favor. It's a deep shame that Kerry couldn't lasso the swiftboat crap like this. Or Gore the "invented the internet" thing.

As things stand now, Republicans will be able to claim that the loss was McCain's fault for running a lousy campaign, and that Americans still support their ideas.

Why is this bad? As things stand now, it'll take the GOP at least one more election cycle to figure out what their actual problem is (their ideology is wrong AND toxic). This means at least another four years before they even attempt to address it.

Maybe it's the healthcare pushback, or perhaps voters are just convinced that their taxes will have to go up no matter who wins. Either way, this was a lynchpin of the McCain/Palin strategy, and the message isn't connecting.

Let's face it -- the American people are sick of Republican mendacity, incompetence, corruption and tyranny. Americans overwhelmingly recognize that the Republicans steered this country in the wrong direction. The GOP can't use a sitting President to campaign publicly, he's so toxic (by contrast, it's conventional wisdom that Gore was unwise not to use Bill Clinton more).

McCain and Palin tried hard to run away from the Republican brand, but their constant need to rally their base -- in October, yet! -- just reminds loyal and sane Americans that they're more of the same.

So much for the comeback.

The past couple days have been a rerun of the last couple of minutes of McCain's RNC speech.

Actually it's a rerun of his speech endorsing Bush at the 2004 Republican convention.

This was all entirely predictable; so much so that I did, in fact, predict it. Bush's campaign never made these sort of attacks or anything close. They always maintained the fiction that the attacks on Gore and Kerry were from outside groups that Bush couldn't control and the media played along. It was even a game for us to try in vain to prove that the Swiftboaters had ties to the Bush Campaign, and the media continued to pretend otherwise.

The fact that they had McCain make these attacks at all is evidence that they didn't want him to win. They just wanted him to use his credibility to smear Obama. And in that, it worked. There are now millions of people who truly believe that Obama is a tratior who is intent on destroying our nation and McCain helped that happen. And that's exactly what McCain was needed for. He did his job and he'll be rewarded by being tossed aside into the trashbin, along with all the other schmucks the Republicans use. Good riddance.

I don't thin the mccain campaign got it backwards when they decided they'd lose if the focus remained on the economy. They would have. They would probably have lost no matter what they did in this year's environment against a really amazing candidate in Obama. But they biggest problem wasn't trying to shift the debate from issues mccain loses on (they had to try to do that), it was the amazingly clumsy and obviously mean and unfair way they did it. Mccain's strength has always been his relationship with the media and they narrative they fed about his honor, straight talk and bipartisanship etc. But he gave that advantage up to make crazy attacks on Obama and pick a ridiculous running mate to stoke the base.