Everyone's giving John McCain advice these days. As he sinks ever lower in the polls, doomed to suffer what Reagan apparatchik Ed Rollins is calling a "landslide" defeat, the candidate himself looks more and more like Terry Gilliam's muttering old man in the Monty Python cartoons, a doddering bent and wretched creature animated only by his incoherent rage. So the GOP brain trust has weighed in, urging McCain to smear Obama more forcefully. Or not to smear him at all. To concentrate on the economy. Or ignore it. To play the race/religion/fear card more vigorously. To leave that card at the bottom of the deck. What's a poor Republican presidential candidate to do? Here, free of charge, are three eminently practical suggestions to get the McCain campaign back on track.
Appoint a co-vice president. Sarah Palin, though beloved by religious crackpots, white supremacists, gun maniacs, and her fellow imbeciles everywhere, just isn't getting the job done. Her nomination was great theater for about forty-eight hours, until reality set in and she stood revealed as a particularly nasty brainless freak. McCain's poll numbers started dropping again soon after. A co-vice president will reassure those Republicans who retain any shreds of sanity that McCain is a serious and fit person to be president. The McCain ticket needs someone friendly, calming, unthreatening, whose own intellect won't unduly embarrass Palin's, and who's certain to appeal to younger voters, now overwhelmingly in Obama's camp. My nomination for co-veep: Barney, the purple dinosaur.
Republicans are concerned that McCain's message isn't getting through to voters. Indeed even regular newspaper readers can't quite figure out what McCain's message actually is. So why not cut out the static and strip the campaign's rhetoric down to its bare truth? That's at least honest and will appeal to voters who still think McCain is a straight talker. My McCain campaign message, stripped of obfuscatory irrelevancies: Vote for the white guy.
Finally, McCain needs a dramatic, headline-grabbing stunt to knock out Obama once and for all. Whipping up mob violence against the Democrat isn't working so far. Accusing him of being a terrorist isn't getting any traction. Voters are far too worried about their household bills and the future of their jobs to care much about GOP political tricks, however vicious. No, McCain must stop this unseemly foaming at the mouth vitriol and throw the ultimate Hail Mary pass of his career. He must simultaneously address the economic meltdown, the nation's disillusionment with its own government, and the yawning black chasm that has opened under millions of formerly secure households. My suggestion for a game-changing position statement certain to throw the election to McCain, that will put the fun back in economics and provide a permanent distraction from the GOP's policies of mass destruction: Abolish the income tax and replace it with an ultra-high stakes federal lottery, run daily.
Sure gambling is unsavory, but McCain is a gambling man and by now he's proved he's plenty unsavory. True the house always wins, and at the punter's expense. That puts the McCain lottery proposal firmly in the mainstream of Republican policy making.