Is it curtains for John McCain? In almost every respect his campaign is contracting inward and on the defensive. He has tried all summer to remain on the offensive, or at least to appear to be, and I've no doubt he'll lash back hard at Obama if his support continues to crumble. But his attacks will come from an almost untenable position.
In the last few days, a string of polls have brought devastating news. Obama is surging nationally as well as in all the swing states, where McCain now is trailing or at best even. It's disastrous that McCain has quickly lost a 5 point lead in Missouri. The fact that Obama is competitive in Florida – not to mention ahead in the polls – suggests a landslide is coming. Because Obama is comfortably ahead in Iowa (and New Mexico), McCain cannot is very unlikely to win without taking at least one of the states Kerry won in 2004. Yet his chances of doing that grower dimmer by the day. Now it's increasingly clear that McCain is pulling down his advertising in Michigan, essentially abandoning one of the few competitive Kerry states a full month ahead of the election.
The money problem will get worse for McCain, not least because he has to defend Florida with its extremely expensive media markets. The Republican ticket, locked into public financing because of Obama's fundraising ability, is going to be outspent for the first time in many elections. McCain's spending will probably continue to contract as he performs triage among the competitive states he can hope to hold onto.
The fundamentals keep getting worse. The economy is a black hole slowly pulling the GOP down. Republicans have to spend much of their time trying to distance themselves from Bush. My own congressman, Charles Dent, just sent us a mailer identifying himself not as a Republican but as an "Independent Representative".
And McCain has created problems for himself that he cannot possibly solve now. He wasted his convention by ignoring issues that voters care about, focusing instead on attacking the Democrats. Why is he running to be president? What are the issues he cares about? The public really has no idea, except perhaps that McCain is obsessed with earmarks. It's rather late to try to fix that hole at the center of his campaign.
His decision to build his campaign around painting Barack Obama as frighteningly incompetent backfired as soon as the presidential debates started. There's no road back now because it's McCain who seems ridiculously out of touch as a result of these allegations.
And I can only begin to catalogue the problems McCain created by selecting a grossly unqualified running mate. Forget about undermining McCain's strategy of attacking Obama on his experience. Palin is so ignorant of so many things that she has to be kept from view and away from questions, even from voters. Although it's Palin who's kept under wraps, it is McCain who is being held hostage to his VP. Almost every appearance of hers destroys a news cycle or three as McCain tries to undo whatever damage she's done. McCain, who tried to focus voters' attention on Obama's defects, has instead turned the focus onto Palin.
That the nation is eagerly anticipating the vice-presidential debate is a mark of how badly McCain has wounded his own campaign. Voters are not going to tune in to hear about any issues McCain might care about, or assess criticisms of Obama. Palin has no standing to make charges stick against the Democrats. Voters aren't even wondering whether Biden will slip up. Nearly everybody is anticipating a Palin train-wreck. Her blathering responses to questions have become a national joke. It will be a relief for Republicans if she ends up rising to a level of mediocrity, if she looks no more callow than Dan Quayle, if her cringe-inducing moments are offset by a few of her sarcastic zingers.
If moderator Gwen Ifill decides it's appropriate to ask follow-up questions after non-responsive answers, then Palin is doomed. Because she has no background in most of the major national and international issues, she has been forced to rely on canned answers with few specifics. As we saw especially in Palin's interviews with Katie Couric, it's the follow-up questions that really expose her shallowness.
In short, McCain's campaign has been reduced to the level of needing to survive the vice-presidential debate. Even worse, it's survival depends on the debate format and the willingness of the moderator to do her job (hence the Republican attempts to put Ifill on the defensive).
A McCain campaign this weak hasn't the stature to rebuild itself, as it needs to do, to make itself competitive in 10 or so swing states. And even if it had plenty of money, there might not be time. In any case, all the time and money probably couldn't salvage this race for McCain. This is looking increasingly like the final weeks of the 1980 presidential race when voters started to tune out from Jimmy Carter's attacks on Ronald Reagan. No matter how desperately Carter sought to shake things up and turn the momentum around, he ended up just shrinking in public perception.
I expect McCain to try various stunts in October to restore his shrinking campaign. I don't expect them to work. Especially after his silly stunt of "suspending" his campaign last week and seeking to postpone the debates, look for McCain's future political stunts to backfire. An Obama victory has always seemed likely this year, given the political landscape and McCain's many vulnerabilities (few of which the Obama campaign has bothered to exploit – when has the topic of Charles Keating arisen, for example?). For me, it's been a question of whether the election would remain close to the end. It now looks likely that Obama will be opening a large lead at least in the electoral college, and that the lead will hold.
Update: Mike Allen at Politico reports that the McCain campaign now believes it must win at least one of three states that Democrats won narrowly in 2004: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. McCain is trailing in all three.
“Our ability to pick off one of those three states is where our fortunes are largely held,” a McCain official said. “These are states where Barack Obama is on the defense.”
In other words, at the moment McCain's best hope is a very narrow electoral college victory...if only he can hold onto five swing states that voted for Bush in 2004: Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.
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