JOHN McCAIN, TRAPPED IN A WORLD HE NEVER MADE

It's noteworthy that Mathew Dowd, a former Bush campaign strategist, is blaming the Sarah Palin pick for John McCain's current woes. But note the implication that the pick was not McCain's fault:

..."They didn't let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP," Dowd declared during the Time Warner Summit panel. "When Sarah Palin got picked instead of Joe Lieberman, which I fundamentally believed would have given John McCain the best opportunity in this race... as soon as he picked Palin, that whole ready versus not ready argument was not credible." ...

Er, Mathew? Sarah Palin didn't "get picked." John McCain picked her. And John McCain passed over Joe Lieberman not because "they didn't let" him pick Lieberman, but because he -- supposedly a big maverick -- didn't have the guts to stand up to "them."

And in any case, what about the GOP base's rejection of Lieberman forced McCain to pick Palin? Weren't there plenty of other possible running mates, all of them more qualified than Palin?

Ah yes, we almost forgot the major factor in the septuagenarian cancer survivor's choice of who would succeed him if he became president and subsequently passed away.

The major factor was that he wanted to "own the weekend."

I take you back to a week and a half before the Palin pick was announced:

..."McCain views this as the one decision that he has total, utter, nonnegotiable control over," one campaign official said.

The announcement strategy -- provided McCain doesn't change it -- calls for naming the pick early Friday morning to try to suppress Obama's bounce coming out of his convention.

"You're going to own the weekend," a McCain official said....

McCain made the surprising pick of Palin (and would have picked the ex-Democrat Lieberman) just because he couldn't bear the thought that Barack Obama would dominate the news cycle for a couple of days after his own convention speech. A decision that could change the course of American history, and that's how McCain made it. He wanted a headline, not a vice president.

Shed no tears for John McCain, victim.