McCain knew what he was buying when he asked the Bush Political Machine to help him get elected to the White House. When you have a man like McCain, who is as disinterested in the details as George Bush has been, you wind up letting the campaign run you.
This results in such statements as "Senator McCain does not speak for the McCain campaign". You have a campaign which is promoting so much racial hatred from white supporters that, in rallies, the crowds have been shouting that Obama deserves to die for opposing McCain.
When John McCain attempted to reign the hate-filled mob back in by claiming that Barack Obama was a decent man, John McCain himself was booed. Now McCain has to try to put the genie back in the bottle, which is most likely impossible.
Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, the xenophobic mob has taken on a life of its own, and is not listening to its creator any more. This makes them particularly dangerous. Barack Obama’s life has been put at risk by a man incapable of controlling his own rage, and is now impotent to control the raging wildfire he himself ignited.
Seemingly, McCain cannot exert control over anything. He cannot control his own campaign. He cannot control his own supporters. He cannot control his surrogates, who one after one have had to be "disappeared", as they committed embarrassing blunders.
McCain is even incapable of controlling the media, which is quite remarkable since he had the media wrapped around his finger with barbecues at his ranch, and AP members bringing McCain his favorite pastry adorned with sprinkles, just the way he liked. He had every pundit that considered themselves objective ignoring gaffe after gaffe, calling them senior moments, or simply answering critics with recitations of John McCain’s prisoner-of-war history.
Yet, John McCain began attacking the media and even angered them. Yes, that whipped up the Republican base, but John McCain forgot that, even he has said earlier in the campaign, that "the media is my base". The media can make you or break you in a campaign. How can a veteran of so many campaigns be unaware of that? His refusal to let Sarah Palin be vetted by the press has caused members of the press, such as Campbell Brown and George Will, to speak out against the once-revered McCain.
Then you have John McCain lurching from position to position during the financial meltdown. The fundamentals of the economy were strong. No. Wait. He didn’t mean the economy when he said "economy", he simply meant the American workers were strong, and that they were fundamentally sound, therefore America was strong.
His explanations failed to win over voters, so to dramatize what a great leader he was, much like in the Georgia invasion, McCain jumped into the middle of the fray feet-first, ready to fight someone. Even in that, he bungled it, alienating popular late night TV host, David Letterman.
How awful it must have been for McCain to tell a popular TV host that he was going to have to cancel his appearance to to back to Washington, D.C. to save the economy which "was about to crater", only to have David Letterman reveal in front of a national audience that, in fact, John McCain had stayed in New York to appear on a different program.
Insult David Letterman at your own peril, especially when you show disrespect for the importance of his show. John McCain did not go to Washington, D.C., for another 22 hours, meanwhile appearing on multiple television shows.
David Letterman did not take that lightly. As you no doubt know, David has chided McCain about McCain’s "political lie" to him on multiple Late Night shows, making John McCain seem like an untrustworthy, lying fool. Again, McCain blew it with the media.
So, what happened when John McCain failed to rush to the aid of the economy and stayed in New York for those extra 22 hours? Well, Congressional leaders announced that they had come to an agreement on the bail-out package. That was Thursday, at noon. John McCain arrived in Washington D.C., later Thusday afternoon.
While Obama cautioned against injecting presidential politics into the bail-out debate, McCain, who had previously delayed, lurched once again into the middle of the fray, like some Tokyo-hating Godzilla. Trampling over all the negotiations that had gone before, the McCain campaign entered the picture and behold, there no longer was an agreement!
After dissolving the previous agreement, McCain could now lay claim to the "financial savior" mantle. All of McCain’s life had been leading up to this moment where he could exert his leadership skills and bring Congress together on this all-important issue. The House Republicans indicated that they would not have been for the bill except for the exceptional leadership of John McCain.
The stage was set for McCain to pull off a game-changing moment in his campaign and in the well-being of each American’s pocketbook. That weekend, John McCain, rather than appearing on Capitol Hill, made phone calls from his posh residence. He said that nothing more was needed. The result? The vote on Monday failed, and even while on the campaign trail, McCain had prematurely congratulated himself, and derided Obama for not doing enough to make sure that the bill passed.
Why did the vote fail? The Republican House members had received phone calls from their supporters saying that this was a bad bill, and ignoring how embarrassing it might be to McCain, they voted "no" on the financial bail-out. That left John McCain trying to back-track and later saying that the initial bill was a bad bill, but the damage had been done.
Americans had seen this lurching back and forth before. They no longer believed, nor trusted, John McCain that what he had said had been misconstrued, that he was taken out of context, that the mainstream "media filter" had misinterpreted his actions. They saw a weak, addled, angry old-man, who lurched between the advice from his Bush campaign minions, and what his gut told him was his best move.
Unfortunately for McCain, both sources of advice have proven wrong.