The Republican party has offered up some pretty lame presidential candidates in the last hundred years. There was Richard Nixon, perhaps one of the most awkward politicians in American history, Bob Dole, with his strange penchant for referring to himself in the third person, George H.W. Bush with his disdain for politics and who can forget the hapless Gerald Ford who had a hard time disembarking from airplanes.
John McCain may be worse than all of these. But that may not stop him from winning this race.
He's such an inept candidate that recent town hall forums have become painful to watch sessions wherein attendees take to the microphones and beg their candidate to go after his opponent. I don't think I've ever seen that happen in my lifetime.
Like Bush 41, McCain has an obvious disdain for red-meat politics, the stuff that drives political campaigns and has left at least a dozen issues that he could have used against Obama off of the table. Even when he awkwardly brought up one of them during the recent debate, Obama's link to Bill Ayers, he did it with the sort of pained look on his face that indicated he really didn't want to but had agreed to because of pressure from aides, supporters and perhaps Governor Palin.
McCain is inept, inarticulate, awkward, angry, antagonistic, archaic, out of touch with his base and he may very well be the next president of the United States. Here's how and why:
As evidenced by the Obama-Clinton race, Obama has a difficulty closing the sale. It took him nearly three months to put away Clinton, and he wasted precious time and resources doing so. Conversely, McCain has a Lazarus-like ability to come back from the dead and in fact seems to consistently create circumstances which put him in an underdog position from which he must bounce back from at the last minute.
That combination-a bad closer and a guy who has a deep psychological need to be a come-from-behind underdog, may make for a surprise finish to this race which at this stage is still Obama's to lose.