McCain Finished? -where have we heard that before (truthdig article from July 17, 2007)

[depakid]

To hear some talk, McCain's campaign is going nowhere and Obama's ready to waltz right into the Whitehouse. Unfortunately, much as we'd like to see McCain meltdown, it hasn't happened yet- and reports of his campaigns demise have been bantered about before.

Word to the wary:

McCain Campaign: Not Dead Yet

Even though Sen. John McCain is still walking and talking like a candidate, the nation’s political writers and pundits are hammering the final nails in his presidential campaign coffin and preparing to bury it in his Arizona desert.

“They never come back,” Robert Novak said Sunday on “Meet the Press.” “I think there is a 40 percent chance he gets out of this thing in the fall,” said fellow panelist Al Hunt. Host Tim Russert quoted this devastating comment from political analyst Charlie Cook: “Let’s have a moment of silence. The physicians have left the room and now it’s the executors of the will taking over.” In New York magazine, John Heilemann outdid Cook, writing, “Though it’s not impossible to conjure a narrative in which McCain wins the nomination, doing so requires half a bottle of Maker’s Mark, followed by a nitrous-oxide chaser.”

Not that a burial of McCain’s campaign is a bad idea. It’s appalling to contemplate McCain as president in view of his unstinting support of President Bush’s Iraq war and his pledge to increase the Army and Marines from the presently contemplated 750,000 to 900,000.

We don’t need a president who believes: “Democratic candidates for president will argue for the course of cutting our losses and walking away from the threat in the vain hope it will not follow us here. I cannot join in such wishful and very dangerous thinking.”

But don’t dismiss him. McCain remains the greatest threat to a Democratic victory next year. Believing the media analyses and writing McCain off now could be a big mistake.

There is good reason to be suspicious of these analyses. The number of examples of journalistic wrongheadedness is endless. One of the worst was the coverage of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. Reporters were charmed by George W. Bush’s frat-boy style and stupid nicknames. Bewitched, they turned the smart, forward-looking, talented Gore into a muddle-headed liar and bore. As Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation last week, “That Al Gore’s 2000 presidential candidacy was treated unconscionably by most members of the mainstream media is not really arguable by sentient beings.”

<snip>

If he survives and even comes close to winning in such states, the reporters writing McCain’s obituary would switch to a fresh story, his comeback. The comeback story would hurt even McCain’s strongest competitors, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the undeclared Fred Thompson, both of whom have enormous weaknesses.

I don’t want McCain to win the Republican nomination. He’s a wild card. I don’t know how well he would campaign in the fall. Logic says there is no chance of him or any other Republican winning. But McCain is unorthodox, always on the edge, a mixture of anger and affability, and a famous ex-POW. He’s capable of shifting his positions, as he did earlier in the year to get in the good graces of the religious right. All that, plus Republican money, would be a dangerous combination in fall 2008.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070717_mccain_campaign_not_dead_yet/
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Democracts need to keep the heat on this guy and ALL Republicans through the convention and into the fall. I we enable them or their policies- or if the campaign bans "Bush bashing" in pursuit of the so called "high road," we risk the same result as the last 2 rounds....

[FrenchieCat]

1. That's a good post.

And I thank you for it.

We must keep our eye on the prize.....

and we can never underestimate the opponent.

And we certainly cannot give him comfort and shelter by ways of
distracting from the disastrous policies that he holds.

We may want "ours" to be perfect when he's not,
But the alternative should be a wake up call
that if we don't work together and go down in defeat,
we will be truly fucked for years to come,
if we even make it that far.

[MadMaddie]

2. Never count your opponent out until the last vote is cast

The Repugs and McCain have shown a propensity for cheating and lying.

The Democratic party is getting better about NOT getting distracted but we still get sidetracked sometimes..

"Eye on the Prize" as our dear FrenchieCat has said time and time again.