So now we know what’s at the heart of the McCain campaign’s strategy: Pray like hell for something awful to happen that will swing the election McCain’s way.
Of course, when you’re pursuing the Earthquake/Towering Inferno/Poseidon Adventure presidential campaign strategy, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. Sure, Al Qaeda wants to hit American again, but they’re not the most reliable bunch – they do things on their own timetable, not John McCain’s or Charlie Black’s.
To that end, here’s a wild-ass guess as to what other force majeure events John McCain and Charlie Black may be praying for that would round out a decent top-ten list:
- An asteroid hits the Atlantic Ocean 50 miles off the East Coast, creating a tsunami that sweeps away all New England and Mid-Atlantic states – except for those parts of New Jersey that every four years make Republicans think that they can take the state.
- The Big One finally hits California, severing it from the West Coast and thus allowing McCain to claim that its 55 electoral votes shouldn’t count.
- Canada invades the U.S. and annexes the East and West coasts, as well as the Great Lakes states, leaving only the Plain States, Upper West and Old Confederacy to vote in the Electoral College.
- Oil prices double to more than $8/gallon, thus leaving only McCain’s core demo – white lobbyists making over $1M/year – capable of affording enough gas to drive to the polls.
- Osama Bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas’ Khaled Mashaal, Hezbollah’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong-il, and Neville Chamberlain’s great-grandson embark on a Barack Obama endorsement tour through the Midwest.
- Diebold voting machines work exactly as intended throughout the country.
- The super-awesome Obama sex scandal that the Clinton campaign wasn’t able to dig up in 15 months FINALLY surfaces.
- Hillary Clinton wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and decides that she does wanna go all the way to Denver after all.
- Over the next 6 months, George W. Bush becomes highly competent, and manages to lower gas prices, "win" the Iraq war, catch Bin Laden, go back in time and respond effectively to Katrina, and turn the economy around.
Sadly for McCain, even if all these things happened, he might still lose.