McCain Paints himself Into A Corner

With less than a month to go before Election Day, the polls are trending if not heavily, then consistently towards an Obama/Biden victory. Even Fox News, the last great bastion of right-leaning politics punditry, has succumbed to what looks like the inevitable: Obama will win and McCain will lose.

Not to be one to let the grass grow under my feet, I'd like to get the post-mortem started a little early. What went wrong for McCain? There's many factors that spelled defeat leading up to the election. Let's look back on some of the telling signs leading up to now, shall we?

• Certainly McCain was never Mr. Popularity among those on the right wing. Seen as too much of a moderate by fellow Republicans, he dared to cross the aisle to co-author legislation in a time where the Republicans enjoyed such a majority in both houses of Congress that compromise seemed an unnecessary evil.
• McCain was tainted by scandal, forever linked to the Keating Five. For those too young to understand... ah hell, just Google it. I'm long-winded enough as it is.
• McCain never quite clicked with the extreme religious right. To Bush's credit, he knew to play Mr. Born Again when the situation called for it.
• McCain relied too heavily on his status as a P.O.W. bad ass giving him the edge over us sissy liberals. It plays well in most cases, but this is a nation bone weary from an endless war.

The list goes on, but the one that caught my attention most recently was at a campaign event where he spoke with a woman who said she feared Barack Obama because he's an "Arab". The implication was clear - Obama wins, wraps his head in a turban , declares himself the Twelve Imam, and imposes Muslim laws. Any Christian holdouts refusing to convert to Islam get beheaded and the Inaugural Dinner is attended by the President of Iran.

McCain, to his credit, corrected the woman, saying Obama is not an Arab, and that he is a fine and honorable man. The crowd immediately booed. Booed! Watching McCain try to regain control of the crowd was just plain sad. Republicans are now booing their own candidate for refusing to propagate lies.

We're supposed to be electing the candidate based on the issues, or so I thought. But as McCain is falling behind in the polls, we've seen the names William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright trotted out once more, dusted off from their months of irrelevance. Republicans insist that these "associations" matter, because they reveal much about the man himself. I say, be very careful when attempting to besmirch Obama based on his associations. In the effort to get McCain elected, and in the past going back to the early 1980's, McCain has had a rogues' gallery on his speed dial, including Charles Keating and a few evangelists that would have us believe that Hurricane Katrina was God's righteous wrath borne against New Orleans for planning a gay pride parade. Scary stuff, that. To have a man in charge who keeps as spiritual counsel men with such Charlton Heston-esque notions of the Almighty makes you wonder how long it would take before we transitioned into a full-blown theocracy.

William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright - let's just admit it - are red herrings. Nothing in Obama's dealings with either of these men tells us anything about what kind of a job he would do as President. Their names are supposed to make you fearful and suspicious. And in your fear of Obama, you're supposed to vote for the safe candidate. But here's a thought - a safe candidate wouldn't employ fear as a tactic to make himself more attractive than the other guy. The safe candidate wouldn't want America to be afraid of anything, would they? It just seems to me that "safety" and "fear" would be mutually exclusive concepts - is it me?