McCain's ignoble failure to ignite

What is wrong with John McCain?

No, I don't mean his physical ailments, partly brought on by age and partly by the vicissitudes of torture at the hands of his captors in Hanoi 40 years ago. And I don't mean his policies, although God knows he has some explaining to do there as well.

I am talking about his inability to carry the battle to his enemies - to look a man square in the eye and tell him, "You are wrong." He hasn't yet determined how to run a campaign aimed against Barack Obama's many flaws, and time is running out. Heck, even Joe Biden understands that McCain looks weak and ineffective on this score.

Biden, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, pointed to "all of the things they said about Barack Obama… on the TV, at their rallies, and now on YouTube, and everything else they're doing before the debate, all the things they're saying after the debate" and noted that "John McCain could not bring himself to look Barack Obama in the eye and say the same things to him."

But most pointedly of all, a McCain supporter at a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Thursday stood up and told McCain to his face what almost all of his supporters are feeling - take off your gloves and fight!

"I'm mad! I'm really mad!" said the unidentified man. "When you have Obama, [House speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there going to run the country, we have to have our head examined. It's time that you two represent the rest of us," he told McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, "So go get 'em!"

McCain, however, clearly didn't even "get" the man's message. "Yes, I'll do that," he said absent-mindedly, before tepidly sliding off into his usual brand of bipartisan malaise. "But I also, my friends, want to address the greatest financial challenge of our lifetime with a positive plan for action that Senator Obama and I have. We need to restore trust and confidence in America and have Americans know that our best days are ahead of us."

Huh? A plan that you and Obama have? Say what?

Sen. McCain, here's the problem. The people who support you for president don't trust Barack Obama, and if you DO trust him, then they don't trust you either. The last thing Republicans want is a plan endorsed by Sen. Obama. So how do you win an election that way?

Probably you don't.

Barring some unforeseen testosterone transfusion, McCain is destined to keep thinking his enemies are his "friends" and that his self-appointed role as the oxymoronic "maverick moderate" will somehow pay off in votes instead of snickers.

It had looked for a while like Pitbull Palin would pull McCain across the finish line, but now it seems safe to assume that McCain will put a muzzle on her and turn the final three weeks of the campaign into a race for last place.

Face it, the McCain campaign is not going to have any help from the national media. With probably a hundred stories or more circulating on the Internet and talk radio about Barack Obama's past associations and mistaken judgments, the only thing the celebrity reporters can focus on is "McCain's negative campaign."

Huh? Say what?

McCain has missed opportunity after opportunity to go after Barack Obama's tax policy, his education policy, his foreign policy and his fiscal policy, let alone his association with ACORN and its fraudulent voter registration campaigns, his 20 years of friendship with the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his ties to the domestic terrorist and lifelong communist William Ayers.

The national media has already painted McCain as a negative campaigner, but the funny thing is, they do it without ever investigating whether the allegations against Obama are true. Doesn't the truth play some small role in whether a campaign is negative or not? I mean, if someone in Russia had called Josef Stalin a mass murderer, would that be considered negative campaigning? Yes, it's a negative statement, but in deciding your future, isn't the truth relevant?

Ugh. It's becoming almost ridiculously silly out there.

This time, I am afraid, America will get the government it deserves, and that - my friends - is a scary thought.

. Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com