Well, the death throes are officially here. Rich Lowry blisters McCain in this recent piece. This is the same guy that may go blind as a result of his crush on Sarah Palin. Palin 2012 has officially kicked off as far as Rich is concerned.
From deep in Jonathan Martin's blog at Politico
http://www.politico.com/...
It's the candidate, stupid
Rich Lowry looks at the plight of McCain from 10,000 up and to the right:
This is the McCain paradox: No other Republican candidate had a character and background — as a courageously independent spirit — better suited to making the presidential campaign competitive this year. But perhaps no Republican candidate was so poorly suited to the task of running a presidential race.
McCain earned his chops as the media’s favorite Republican senator by being a maverick, or in a less exalted formulation, a gadfly. He pursued pet causes inimical to his party, such as campaign-finance reform, and made it his role to tell fellow Republicans what he considered hard truths.
None of this endeared him to Republican primary voters. He won the nomination anyway on the basis of his admirable support for the surge (adopted when he was in typical gadfly mode) and a few stock lines. He became the Republican nominee by default, without an organization or fundraising operation to speak of, and soon enough lost the press, too.
McCain’s rapport with the media depended on snarky banter about his own party and about himself. That couldn’t continue in the general election, so McCain’s campaign cut him off. His lifeline to his former admirers denied to him, McCain became a demonstrably unhappy warrior.
As a gadfly, McCain often attacked Republican campaign tactics. He denounced the Swift Boat vets in 2004. Still thinking like a gadfly, back in April he reprimanded the North Carolina Republican Party for running an ad featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In ruling Wright out of bounds, McCain had taken off the table Barack Obama’s most damaging association. McCain had gadflied himself!
Not surprisingly, McCain has been badly outclassed in fundraising by Obama. As a gadfly, McCain always considered fundraising fundamentally distasteful. He celebrated the public financing rules that Obama has blown by on his way to raising some $750 million. McCain was so adamant about campaign-finance strictures that he harangued against independent groups, so-called 527s, and partly as a result, there are few of them to come to his aid in his desperate hour of financial need.
When you’re a gadfly, you can flit above the substantive debate, because it’s your posture rather than your knowledge of policy that matters most. People who argued with McCain years ago about campaign-finance reform always were shocked by how little he knew about his own signature policy initiative. It’s been a long road for McCain to get up to speed on domestic policy, and he’s constantly fallen back on one of his greatest hits as a gadfly, his opposition to earmarks.
Et tu Rich?
Thanks to many suggestions. In short, the GOP is now officially splitting into a Palin camp, made up of uneducated, white middle class voters, religious nutballs whose only concerns are abortion and prayer in schools, and true nuts like those two gill breathers in TN that just got arrested. I do hope they form their own party. Rush Limbaugh can lead them to all move to Alaska then formally withdraw from the US.