For a campaign that’s had only bad days for weeks, yesterday afternoon set a definitive standard for McCain-Palin. Within hours, (a) McCain had to retract and start trying to walk back their sole selling-point, and (b) the Alaska Legislative Council (8 GOPers, 4 Dems) unanimously voted to release a report that found Palin to have committed abuse of power.
Incredibly, as this double coup de grâce fell, from Vienna the AP reported that Austrian politician Joerg Haider — “whose far-right rhetoric at times cast a negative light on the Alpine republic” – had died in a car wreck. R.I.P., nasty Herr Haider, but really, how’s that for an uncanny echo?
We can be confident that something other than regained decency (since there’s none to regain) accounts for McCain’s 180º turn. I’ll stick by my first two impressions: the Secret Service has had a word with him, as have some prominent Republicans and their pollsters. The latter’s word will have been “Asshole. You’ve set us up for what could be the worst blowout in the history of American elections. You’re on your own.” (They won’t own their own historical part in it, you know; they’re Republicans.) In a post headlined Does McCain Have Cooties?, poll-maven Nate Silver records:
This is pretty interesting:
[Norm] Coleman told reporters that he would not be appearing at a planned rally with McCain this afternoon. Could it be McCain’s sliding polling numbers in Minnesota? His attacks on Obama? Coleman said he needs the time to work on suspending his own negative ads.
“Today,” he said, “people need hope and a more positive campaign is a start.”
Silver counts three groups of GOPers with reason to haul-fanny away from McCain:
Firstly, purple-state moderates like Coleman and Gordon Smith who don’t like the campaign’s tone. Secondly, the anti-bailout economic populists in the House who might be looking ahead to 2010 and 2012. And thirdly, true conservatives who never trusted McCain that much to begin with.
Wait a minute. Isn’t that just about the whole Party — except for the racist-Christianist-lunatic fringe McCain alienated yesterday by suddenly shushing them? Silver describes how, to an extent much greater than Obama, McCain must rely on his party’s institutional support (while trying to skirt, as CrookedTimber notes, “the limits of the legislation that he himself co-wrote[, as] is just about legal”):
With McCain having opted for public financing, RNC funds are an important part of his advertising budget. Because he’s way behind Obama on McCain-branded field offices and ground operatives, he is depending on assistance from state and local party organizations. Republican enthusiasm lags behind that of Democrats, and so volunteer resources are scarcer; conservative activists will need to decide if they’re going to make phone calls to support McCain or to help save their local Republican Congressman.
Ruh-oh. More from CrookedTimber:
So I hear (via a prominent member of the sane Republican faction) that the word on the right side of the street is that the Republican National Committee is about to pull the plug on its joint ads with the McCain campaign, and devote its resources instead to trying to save a couple of the senators who are at serious risk of losing their seats. Now this is gossip, albeit of the high class variety; take it with the requisite pinch of salt. …
(Whaddaya bet, if CT’s gossip proves out, Roger Wicker is first-in-line or nearly?)
But on to Palin . . . No sooner had the Branchflower Report hit the media than Camp McCain hit Spin. “Good news!,” they wailed. As they have it, since the report says Palin was within her rights to fire Walt Monegan for any reason or none, she’s in the clear (but my, check out them bus tracks all over Todd).
Not. Exactly. The Monegan firing was mere symptom, not the disease, and David Kurtz whiffs Red herring heavy on the McCainiac diagnosticians’ breath:
The report details the extraordinary lengths that Gov. Palin, largely through her husband Todd, went to get her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired because of personal family reasons (namely, his nasty divorce from Palin’s sister). It was this effort, which led to pressure being improperly brought to bear on numerous state employees, that constituted an abuse of power by Palin. … Monegan’s firing is evidence of the broader scheme, not the scheme itself. Cold comfort if you’re a McCain-Palin supporter.
By now, I can’t think of any comfort, cold or otherwise, for a McCain-Palin supporter — not that anyone still in that category merits any. The GOP’s stay-at-home percentage on November 4 is going to be massive, isn’t it?
You know, as I surveyed their choice of losers this time last year, only Huckabee worried me a bit. “He’ll fall far short too,” I figured, “but he might fool more voters longer than any of these other mopes.” But it ended up McCain, and then McCain-Palin . . . and by now, all’s left to say for post-Bush Republicanism is
R.I.P.
