So he should run against Congress. Well, I'm reading between the lines a bit. In his column in WaPo this morning. he throws cold water on the "irrational exuberance" that has many Repubs believing Palin can save McCain:
But the country's romance with her will, as romances do, cool somewhat, and even before November some new fad might distract a nation that loves "American Idol" for the metronomic regularity with which it discovers genius in persons hitherto unsuspected of it.
OK, so the whole country is not in love with her (there are even some Kossacks that really don't like her) and many of us have not yet discovered the "genius" in her, but behind the veil of hyperbole is his admission that the bloom is already off Palin's rose. Will goes on to advise McCain to look elsewhere for salvation, but his suggested solution reeks of desperation and is doomed to fail. More analysis below the fold.
Will throws in the towel for McCain in his match-up against Obama. Will's advice to McCain is to forget about trying to beat Obama (my read), and to run instead against a Democratic Congress:
McCain should, therefore, enunciate a closing argument for his candidacy that goes to fundamentals of governance, concerning which the vice presidency is usually peripheral. His argument should assert the virtues of something that voters, judging by their behavior over time, prefer -- divided government.
To justify this idiotic suggestion, Will raises the spectre of two calamities that will befall the citizenry if Democrats hold Congress (his column assumes that they will increase majorities in both House and Senate) and the presidency. Will apparently believes Americans are laying awake at night terrified not about the economy (or Barack's laundry list of what really concerns Americans), but that a Democratic Congress will enact "[t]he exquisitely misnamed Employee Free Choice Act [which] would strip from workers their right to secret ballots in unionization elections[,]" and that they will "kill talk radio". Yeah, I'm wetting my bed worrying over those issues.
We should hope McCain takes Will's advice, because it is boneheaded and "exquisitely" untimely. First, boneheaded because: Will points out that the public's approval rating for Congress is even less than for Bush, but he forgets three key realities. (1) There is a shitload of Republicans in Congress, one of whom is McCain himself. (2) There is a humongous shitload of Democrats and indies that that disapprove of congressional Republicans in general and McCain in particular. (3) Barack's approval rating is higher than Congress's, Bush's and McCain's. What's McCain's sound bite going to be, "Put a congressional Republican in the White House because you're fed up with Republicans in Congress"? People who have decided to vote for Obama don't want "divided government"; they know he's a Democrat, and even now there is a Democratic majority in Congress. And I may be going out on a limb, but I don't think the undecideds are going base their presidential vote on how unions conduct elections or the ludicrous suggestion that the First Amendment could be repealed by Democratic legislation. Will's argument is way down on the list of what matter to an indie, by definition: it is fundamentally a party-identity argument. Which leads to:
Second, "exquisitely" untimely because: The tanking of the economy in the past week is indisputably the result of Republican deregulation legislation and eight years of a laissez-faire Republican president. And as McCain himself has bragged (claimed? admitted?), he has been "oversighting" the economy for 26 years. Could there be a worse time to put the word "Republican" back into his stump speeches? Is it wise for him at this point in time to draw the electorate's attention to a checks and balance issue, when he has for so long been a primary advocate of removing the checks and balances on financial institutions, which is what got us into the present mess? I think not.
So I hope McCain takes Will's advice.
I have to comment on one other statement in Will's column which is off-subject. Believe your lying eyes, Will takes the position that what prevents us from being blessed with four more years of Bush is not that 70 per cent of the public thinks he sucks, but that "The 22nd Amendment will banish the president in January[.]" Will thinks Bush would have won if he could've run again. I guess only 30 per cent of the public might agree, but I appreciate the reminder that the 22nd Amendment protects us from the wackjobs who voted for Bush twice already. Enough!