A lot of people are wondering whether, in the aftermath of his nasty, McCarthyite, media-bashing campaign, John McCain can ever get back to the good old days when he was the press's best friend and barbecue chef.
Short answer: yes. Long answer: hell yes. In fact, the process has already begun.
Here's Elisabeth Bumiller, in today's New York Times,wasting no time in declaring the Evil
Somewhere in a corner of northeastern Ohio, just five days before the presidential election that more than a few pundits have declared he will lose, Senator John McCain sat in the back of his campaign bus telling his favorite Henny Youngman jokes. No one laughed harder than he did....
For 90 minutes, as his bus rumbled from the edge of Lake Erie to Youngstown, Mr. McCain kept up the patter...
... in the frantic last days of his nearly two-year second quest for the presidency, Mr. McCain has liberated himself from the irritable, edgy candidate of a month ago. He has, by all appearances, decided he will get to Tuesday by having a good time.
...He is ... now in the role that he finds at least familiar, if not comfortable -- the scruffy underdog barking at Washington. It was not for nothing that his first stop Thursday was in Defiance, Ohio....
Wait -- it gets worse:
Mr. McCain has also been moved these last few days, his aides say, by the panorama of America that has unfolded before him. He has made appearances at high school football fields, town squares and lumberyards....
On Friday Mr. McCain marveled to aides about the beauty of the rolling Appalachian foothills on Ohio's border with West Virginia. On Saturday his motorcade sped through a tunnel of gold leaves in Bucks County, Pa....
I bet B. Hussein Osama didn't look at any damn leaves, the foliage-hating Muslim commie!
The revisionism is already setting in: not only is McCain nice again, he's been nice for weeks. What, you didn't notice? Let Bumiller explain:
... he was devastated, aides said, when Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and civil rights leader, invoked the segregationist George Wallace to rebuke Mr. McCain for tolerating insults and threats hurled at Mr. Obama at his rallies.
Mr. McCain took the edge off some of his rhetoric and has in the last few days loosened up in his speeches....
... the "get off my lawn" tone of the angry guy across the street has at times become a more neighborly "give me a break." ...
Yup, he's been calling Obama a socialist Manchurian candidate who'll destroy America -- but in the nicest possible way.
Meanwhile, Politico's Jonathan Martin, in a piece titled "What If Wright Played a Bigger Role in Campaign?" (don't bother to read it, there'll be a thousand more of these by Thanksgiving, unless McCain wins an upset), tells us that McCain is by nature an agonized and ineffectual negative campaigner:
...What most all Republican strategists agree on is that in order to use Wright against Obama effectively, the assault would have needed to have been begun earlier in the campaign and as part of a broader message -- unlike the McCain camp's halfhearted attempt to link the Democrat to 1960s-era domestic terrorist William Ayers in early October, a line of attack McCain himself never fully embraced and that the campaign ultimately removed from Sarah Palin's stump speech.
... if McCain's campaign could have coaxed the candidate into signing off on hammering Wright, the candidate's unease with the topic may have diluted its effectiveness.
"John McCain has difficulty delivering those kinds of attacks," noted Terry Nelson, who until last year managed the Arizona senator's campaign. "It's better to not put a candidate in a position to do something they're not good at." ...
Yeah, what a crummy job the McCain campaign has done when it's tried to go negative -- you can tell nobody's heart is in it.
Prediction, in the event of an Obama victory: John McCain will be one of the leaders of the obstructionist caucus in Congress -- and will be praised as a maverick for this (after all, we'll be told, he did the same thing to Bush on tax cuts in 2001).
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