The Senior Senator From Arizona Doth Protest Too Much

It's hard to say which perception McCain fears worst: being seen as yesterday's man -- a man of the last century -- or being seen as a shameless toady who sold his "maverick" soul for a bloated, stinking elephant carcass:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Thursday that Republican John McCain was "losing his bearings" for repeatedly suggesting the Islamic terrorist group Hamas preferred Obama for president.

. . .

"This is offensive, and I think it's disappointing, because John McCain always says, 'Well, I'm not going to run that kind of politics,'" Obama said. "And then to engage in that kind of smear, I think, is unfortunate, particularly since my policy toward Hamas has been no different than his."

The Illinois senator added: "For him to toss out comments like that, I think, is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination. We don't need name-calling in this debate."

McCain's campaign issued an angry response that accused Obama of trying to divert attention from a legitimate question by raising McCain's age.

"He used the words 'losing his bearings' intentionally, a not-particularly-clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue," McCain adviser Mark Salter said.

Really?  Seems that the McCain campaign is stuck between a rock and a hard place here.  

See, my first reaction on reading Obama's comments was to think of how McCain had sacrificed his "maverick" image -- an entirely phony persona, but a powerful one -- to win the booby prize that is the 2008 GOP nomination.  Obama was observing that McCain has been "losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination," in the sense that he's lost his steely, maverick moral compass.  Now, Obama understands just as well as you and I that the "maverick" myth was the gossamer creation of a Michael Lewis mancrush, but he also understands that there's great value in developing a semi-tragic narrative in which the flawed hero McCain trades his virtue for a final shot at power.  You can't disabuse the majority of the public of the idea that McCain was at one point a good guy, but you can certainly show them just how irrevocably corrupted he's become in pursuit of the poisoned chalice.

And I think that McCain, and his campaign, get exactly what Obama is doing here.  They are deathly afraid of losing the aura of straight-shooting independence that differentiates their candidate from the depraved, cancerous body of lepers that passes for the Bush/DeLay/Fossella/Craig Republican Party.  They know that McCain cannot win as a "Republican nominee" -- his only hope is to run as an independent.  In short, McCain's greatest weakness is the prospect that he might be exposed as Just Another Sleazy Republican Hack.  And Obama's comments, in just a few words, did a marvelous job of setting that narrative in motion in the public eye.  So McCain and his minions pivoted, and attempted to divert the attention away from their greatest weakness.

Problem is, they diverted the attention onto their second greatest weakness -- the fact that John McCain is yesterday's man, a bedraggled lion decidedly incapable of prevailing over the course of six months of toe-to-toe combat with an acutely aware and prepared Obama.  McCain shouldn't ever remind people of his age, of his inability to keep Sunni and Shi'a straight in his mind, of his tired demeanor.  Yet when confronted with Obama's observation that McCain has abandoned his integrity in a last-ditch attempt to win the White House, McCain was so terrified that he preferred to treat the comments as an insinuation about his age.  And in so doing, he raised the age issue himself -- leaving the public to consider whether McCain's problem is that he's past his time, or that he's a chameleon who'll do anything to get elected.  That's the last question that McCain wants anyone pondering.

Maybe he should have just left this one alone.  Because by responding as he did, McCain showed that Obama had hit home.  And Obama is way too good not to sense blood in the water.