Pure, unadulterated schadenfreude is coursing through my veins right now, having just finished reading this astonishing piece at Politico.com about the complete meltdown of John McCain's campaign:
http://www.politico.com/...
Blame game: GOP forms circular firing squad
With despair rising even among many of John McCain’s own advisors, influential Republicans inside and outside his campaign are engaged in an intense round of blame-casting and rear-covering—-much of it virtually conceding that an Election Day rout is likely.
It just gets more and more delicious after that... More after the jump.
As McCain essentially tells the Washington Times that the Bush administration had screwed things up for him, people inside his campaign and big Republican donors are starting to line up their excuses and point fingers.
The Politico article quotes one Republican bigwig as saying that he's already started getting resumés from top McCain staffers, a breach of standard campaign protocol.
The article calls the atmosphere in the campaign "increasingly acrid," with staffers leaking information to blame others for their failures -- and "epidemic of incontinence," in the three authors' words.
They also characterizes the relationship between McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee as "dysfunctional" and uncoordinated.
Meanwhile, knives getting sharpened and rats are preparing to abandon ship:
"If you really want to see what ‘going negative’ is in politics, just watch the back-stabbing and blame game that we’re starting to see," said Mark McKinnon, the ad man who left the campaign after McCain wrapped up the GOP primary. "And there’s one common theme: Everyone who wasn’t part of the campaign could have done better."
"The cake is baked," agreed a former McCain strategist. "We’re entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It’s every man for himself now."
The piece also alludes to an upcoming Sunday Times pre-mortem, which can already be read online:
A New York Times Sunday magazine piece chronicling McCain’s campaign featured numerous not-for-attribution McCain staffers participating in what amounted to a campaign autopsy. One aide told writer Robert Draper, "For better or worse our campaign has been fought from tactic to tactic," and one criticized McCain’s debate performance.
[...]
A senior Republican strategist, speaking with authority about the view of the party’s establishment, issued a wide-ranging critique of the McCain high command: "Lashing out at past Republican Congresses, ... echoing your opponent's attacks on you instead of attacking your opponent, and spending 150,000 hard dollars on designer clothes when congressional Republicans are struggling for money, and when your senior campaign staff are blaming each other for the loss in The New York Times [Magazine] 10 days before the election, you’re not doing much to energize your supporters.
I'm not counting any chickens before they hatch, and am (like pretty much everyone I know) going to keep making calls and sending emails and getting out the vote. This Politico piece just impels me to do even more, to go all-out not just for a win -- but, as they say, for a rout.
Let's give Barack a true mandate in 12 days.