was when Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki endorsed Barack Obama's Iraq plan. After hearing that, I told my brother that the election was over. And I stand by it. McCain's whole pitch was that Obama's Iraq plan was dangerous and misguided and that the surge was working. The latter is, now, completely irrelevant. Obama's plan is now pretty much how it's going to be, and McCain has no fallback. He has no Plan B. I think this news means that Mitt Romney is 10-1 as McCain's VP candidate as he supposedly has economic stewardship in his favor, and McCain's going to have to try to campaign on the economy, which is not friendly territory for the Republicans. My guess is that McCain will wind up pursuing several threads in the general election:
- He'll keep talking about how he was right about the surge, which won't matter as he was wrong about the war to begin with, was wrong about what to do next year, and is going to have to triangulate to remain even viable in this election. Which he's already doing.
- He'll go after the economy and basically make the standard GOP attacks about how he wants to lower taxes for
gazillionaires hard-working middle class voters and the Democrats want to raise them. That will no doubt warm Grover Norquist's heart but taxes just aren't a big issue this election year, despite the GOP always wanting them to be. - He'll keep trying to subtly advance the smears about Barack Obama (exhibit A: McCain says "I don't know" if Obama's a socialist), and destroy all good will among folks like me who used to like him. He says he'd rather lose a campaign than lose a war, but apparently he's willing to become just as bad as the GOP pit bulls he used to hate in order to win an election.
- Many, many more uses of his trademark (and unbelievably irritating) catchphrase, "my friends." (Okay, that was a funny one, but probably true too.)
I'm pretty sure this is how it's going to turn out. Obama's going to win, in my opinion. He's already experiencing a bounce in the polls, and by the time he gets back from Europe he ought to have around a ten-point lead in the polls. He'll probably build on that after the Democratic convention. I don't think there's any way John McCain will be able to erase a lead that big. Certainly not by saying he was right about the surge. Maybe if he did something bold like promise to balance the budget...not that I really want that to happen as I have other priorities, but I would like the debate and I think things worked better when Democrats were a bit more willing to spend and the GOP was a bit tighter with the purse strings. But I don't think McCain will do something like that. He sees himself as a reformer but he's not really that...his version of reform is less about cleaning house and reorienting the GOP and more about taking courageous (in the MSM's point of view) centrist (read: liberal) stands against his party on boutique issues like campaign finance reform.
But I just don't see him making such a bold shakeup. Even if he did I still can't see him winning. He's up against an historic candidate whose election might well atone, in the eyes of the world, for our darkest sins, both old and current. McCain simply can't offer that. Plus, virtually nobody seems too excited about his candidacy.
