McCain Report

Several news outlets are reporting that for McCain, it is President or Bust.

The new news is that McCain, floundering in the presidential polls, is not even the favorite politician in his home state. A new poll, conducted in Arizona, has the democratic Governor, Janet Napolitano, beating McCain in a potential race. Both policitician's terms end in 2010. The Arizona Republic reports:

The poll says that Napolitano, a Democrat, would defeat Arizona's senior U.S. senator by 11 percentage points, 47 percent to 36 percent, if the two were running for the Senate today. Seventeen percent of respondents were undecided, according to the poll of 629 Arizona voters conducted by the nonpartisan Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center.

Anne Applebaum has written a fantastic piece analyzing the election process thus far. Everything is not as one would have guessed it would be at this time. She notes that considering all the disdain for the republican party, democrats should win without trouble. Yet, the two frontrunners, Hillary and Obama, are unelectable.

And John McCain, on the outside, is the perfect choice for the republican nomination. But he is fading badly. She writes:

By any normal reckoning, the candidate should be Senator John McCain. Fantastically well-versed in foreign affairs, adored by the Washington press corps, with a war-hero biography and a long political career, McCain is nevertheless faltering, badly. He's thought too old - he's 70 - as well as too unwell, with a history of war injuries and skin cancer.

Far more importantly, his party's deep-pocketed funders aren't giving him any money. It seems that his long reputation as a moderate, even a maverick, willing to disagree with the party elders (and the religious Right) in public has come back to haunt him. His campaign is broke.

Her piece illustrates all that is great about this American election process. You just never know. And, as they say, "that's why they play the game".