No Good News for McCain

William Kristol, a week after advising the McCain campaign to go negative on Bill Ayers/Jeremiah Wright, is now telling him to fire his staff and "reboot" his campaign.

This seems to be the McCain Theme of the Week (tm), probably propelled by the video of McCin being disgusted with the woman calling Obama an arab. To his credit, I did think better of McCain for doing that and also, to his credit, I think he genuinely doesn't like what we wrought there and tried to do some damage control. It as an honest moment from him that gave him a shred of dignity in my book. It won't make me vote for him, but it does improve his damaged reputation a bit.

What's been interesting is reading the comments on the Kristol column. All the ones I read, the first 4 or 5 pages, reflect the same sentiment from Democrats and Republicans alike; it's too little, too late.

The modern presidential campaign uses columns like this to test trial balloons, i.e. a staff hack writes them (in this case New York Times Opinion columnist William Kristol who is famous for being ... well I don't know), then the campaign tries to sift out whether or not the idea has merit. Will the idea resonate with swing voters, will it piss off the base, will it make the opponents react badly etc. What surprised me in these comments was the over all consistency of the reaction, that it would be yet another gimmick and a campaign that should have been talking substance weeks ago. That, and the universal acknowledgement that any reboot starts with dumping Palin (which they absolutely cannot d0).

With 3 weeks to go, anythign can still happen. 538 points out today that Reagan was behind Carter by more than this at this point in the election cycle, and his October Surprise with the Iranian hostages spun it around at the last moment. Could Bush pull OBL out of his cave at the last moment? Maybe. I'm not certain it would help, since it might just have the reaction of removing any remain support for the war (whew! We got him! Okay, that's over), but it could conceiveably boost the Republicans. And who knows what else the next three weeks could bring. No one should be counting chickens or making nominations for Secretary of State yet.

I'm not sure how the McCain folks will react to Kristol's advice, but it should be interesting to watch.