McCain Campaign in its Death Throes

I thought the McCain campaign was in deep trouble when I made my last post on Thursday. As I watched the news updates yesterday and today, I continued to be amazed at how bad the news was for McCain and how dreadful the campaign's reactions to recent events have been. Let's do a quick rundown, in increasing order of ineptitude:

McCain is spending today in Iowa, and Palin is preparing for a bus tour through West Virginia

Just ridiculously bad strategy by the campaign. Not once, out of any of the 27 polls released in '08 from Iowa, has McCain led Obama (there was one tie). fivethirtyeight.com gives Obama a 97% chance of winning the state. And yet, McCain chose to spend one of his precious last days in a state he has virtually no chance of winning instead of in Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, or any of the other states that are far more likely to influence the outcome of the election.

And, let me tell you, sending Palin to West Virginia can be nothing more than an effort to keep from getting absolutely CRUSHED in the Electoral College. There is no chance that West Virginia will change the outcome. If West Virginia is close enough that Palin needs to visit, that means that he certainly has also lost Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, whose rural regions are demographically similar to WV but also have larger urban and/or black populations. So a close win in West Virginia thanks to a Palin visit would turn a 210 Electoral vote defeat into a 200 vote defeat. That's the best use of Palin's time?

The Branchflower Report on "Troopergate"

Alaska's Legislative Council, which has more Republicans than Democrats, voted 12-0 to release a report which said that Palin abused her power and broke a state ethics law. The McCain/Palin campaign, incredibly, argued that the report was a partisan vendetta, despite the fact that, as previously discussed, it was Republican-dominated.

While this report is bad for Palin, I don't think it actually will move any votes. People who already love Palin will continue to do so, people horrified by her will be even more so, and I really don't think there are that many people who hadn't already formed an opinion of her one way or the other. It does strengthen what I think is an already-strong, objective case that she would be a terrible VP.

McCain's campaign manager admitted McCain "blew up" the original bailout deal.

Ben Smith has the story.

[I]n the middle of the greatest disaster in our financial system that we’d had in our lifetime, that the Democrats in the United States Senate would actually link payments to ACORN in the bailout package that they promoted -- prior to Sen. McCain coming to town and actually blowing that package up. So we can actually say that in addition to saving taxpayers millions of dollars, and we’re very happy that no more taxpayer dollars were added to the pile of money going to ACORN.

This statement, not by some flunky or a left-winger but by McCain's own campaign manager, Rick Davis, directly and completely contradicts McCain's own statements about his role in the bailout, which, to remind everyone, is the government's most significant action in response to the economic crisis, clearly the biggest issue of the campaign. Senator McCain, during an event (in Iowa, for some reason) the day after the House voted down the original bailout package, said:

"Our leaders are expected to leave partisanship at the door and come to the table to solve our problems. Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process."

So McCain publicly blamed Obama for blowing up the bailout bill when in fact, as his campaign manager admitted yesterday, McCain was the one who did the blowing.

This is a big, big deal. McCain should thank his lucky stars that the Palin probe report came out yesterday and drowned out news of this shocking bit of truth from the dying McCain campaign.