I agree absolutely, if McCain makes an earnest and heartfelt mea culpa, says he is at fault for letting things get out of hand and will fire the people who have given him such bad advice, beyond this he should finally mention something about the groundbreaking nature of Obama's race, how it represents a milestone in American history and how proud he is to share the stage with Obama, and if Obama wins will do his best to support him when issues allow, and then go on to explain that it is those differences on the issues which set them apart and on the issues he is asking people for their support.

After Hillary and Obama had a lovefest of a debate pre Ohio and Texas, (the one people took as Hillary's elegy, where she said how proud she was to be with Obama) Hillary began her great comeback winning both states popular votes (this was all pre-Wright). If McCain goes all warm and fuzzy he will be considered to have won the debate hands down and will start to shrink the gap straight away.

Hail mary passes are not an offensive strategy.  But I expect the press to develop amnesia over the next couple of days and report this as if this is in fact a NEW McCain.  Or something.  Whatever.

For Bill Kristol, this isn't really about making John McCain president. It's about allowing Bill Kristol to continue to worship the great men in his life. Bill Kristol has two stages of grief when confronted with the failure of his heroes to live up to his fantasies of their potency: Denial and scapegoating. The first stage is simply to deny, in the manner of Fred Barnes, that his hero is failing. The war is going just fine! Things aren't so bad in New Orleans! The economy is in great shape! McCain is on the road to victory!

To his credit, at least compared to his colleague Barnes, Kristol can move beyond denial of reality to a form of acceptance. But Kristol has a particularly authoritarian form of acceptance, in that it fixes blame for failure on the incompetence and mendacity of the people around his heroes charged with carrying out the Great Man's vision. So if maybe we aren't winning the war in Iraq after all, it's because the president has been betrayed by the liberal intelligence community, or by individual generals with their own agendas, or, and here is where Kristol eventually settled, by a secretary of defense who refused to carry out the president's orders. (And if a cabinet secretary mutinies against the president and by this mutiny loses a war, and the president keeps him in office for two more years, whose fault is that? Kristol never asks.) If maybe things actually are pretty bad in New Orleans, it's because the president has been betrayed by underlings who hid the full extent of their own bumbling from him. If maybe the economy isn't the best we've ever had after all, then it's because Republicans in Congress and a secretary of the treasury and fed chairman with their eyes on post-Bush political survival have refused to embrace the president's economic policies. And so on.

So now, Kristol is forced to conclude that perhaps McCain isn't on the verge of the landslide Kristol has been predicting. Why? A bad campaign, of course. But that's not the candidate's fault. Oh no, left to his own devices, McCain would surely be running a different campaign, a better campaign, a winning campaign. McCain has been betrayed by all those people he hired to carry out his orders, nefarious operatives who offer McCain advice, and then when McCain commands them to act on this advice, the snakes have the nerve to do so. Why, how could poor John McCain have known that when he staffed his campaign with the castoffs of the Bush campaigns, including the very same people who dishonorably smeared his own family in 2000, that his campaign would become a spectacle of dishonorable smears and a second-rate rerun of the Bush campaigns? Nobody could possibly have predicted such an outcome; McCain is a blameless victim of all those people he hired.

Even the most casual reader of Bill Kristol could have written today's column blaming McCain's poor performance on everybody except McCain. The only question was when he was going to run it -- this week, or after the election.

The New, New McCain. C'mon, there's been this meme for weeks that McCain hasn't really wanted to do all this nasty stuff, that he's really just a good guy. Groundwork laid.

I've thought that, winning or losing, McCain would have to go into brand-repair mode anyway before the election was over. Does he really want to fade from the scene with the most vitriolic, racist campaign in recent memory? Naw....

And frankly, a lot of people are going to be relieved to see Mac is back. Although it is too late to help with early voters.

what the hell...he's got nothing to lose.

Somehow though, after the last two weeks, I think as Governor Geddings told Charlie Kane, he may need a few thorough ass whuppin's to really learn his lesson.

One last note before I go down into the salt mine for the rest of today: Sometimes it takes a complete thrashing to achieve clarity. I can remember sitting on the canvas, nose streaming blood like a faucet, left eye closed like a bank vault, head spinning like a top, and looking up at this bad ass waiting for me to reassemble my parts and get up off the canvas so he could continue beating the shit outta me, when I realized, like an epiphany, that I did not have a promising future as a boxer. It became so clear...I layed back down and allowed the ref to count to the magical number 10 and my suffering was over.

This bit of sporting advice is what I now offer The Mummy....

McCain isn't deciding if a change can harm his chances to win. A silly, belated and/or potentially harmful tactic will be compared with continuing the status quo which will lead to certain defeat. McCain only has three options: 1.) He can do nothing and only an external event and/or a forced error by Obama will benefit him. 2.) He can defy the polling data, find evidence that nullifies their predictive value and hope his forecast prevails. 3.) He can fire staff, express remorse for recent tactics, declare a course and announce a major policy (pick one or pick all).  

McCain also seems cognizant that his character and reputation is suffering and he can rehabilitate his image even if he can't make changes that will win him the the election. I don't know how his decisions will be perceived, he can't appear to be making another desperate move that is another 'suspension of his campaign'. It will require a dramatic, sincere and complete the change and be seen in the context of contrition. There is also a question whether any changes can be a sufficient rehab without addressing his choice of Palin as political-tactical and agreeing with the critics who cited her lack of qualifications for the position. I agree that there are reasons for him to make changes and they are not related to increasing his chances of victory. But the goal of salvaging his reputation before the election is final will require he repudiate more than what Kristol has on his list.  

He hasn't fired Schmidt, though, has he? And I'll bet Palin doesn't back off so much. This is just McCain realizing that he's going to lose, but that the way he's going it'll be a blowout. If he tacks back to "old" McCain, the election will be closer and he'll have enough of a reputation that he won't be a pariah next year.

So now that Kristol realizes the low road doesn't lead to the White House, he wants to lead the Republican Party in a different direction? And he wants to do it by being nicer and using better grammar?

www.nytimes.com/.../13kristol.html

He'd better avoid The Palm. Roger Ailes' empire would collapse if folks got off the low road - that's his audience. And what's more important, Rush's ratings or the future of "conservativism"?

If McCain goes all wobbly on us, what happens to the Base? There are already some conspiracy-mongers on the right who fear that the McCain who warmed their hearts by picking Palin and asking "who's the real Obama?" will be a liberal in office. (The horror, the horror, but perhaps that's intended as a contrast to Obama, who in the slur du jour is not a liberal, but a Socialist.) If McCain says "I'm sorry that some of my supporters can't say the word 'Obama' without spewing spittle on everyone within a five foot radius" won't that hurt the spittle-spewers' sensitive feelings?