Thanks for starting my day with a great laugh!

The haphazard and delinquent effort to catch up to McCain’s energy policy blitz (which has been going on for weeks now) also tells us something else: Obama thinks he can ignore whatever McCain is doing.

It is not surprising for the candidate who considers himself already President to disregard what his opponent is up to.
The temptation is great to try to run out the clock and get by on pablum and pretty pictures.

But Obama does it at his peril . He is now struggling to find a way to counteract the McCain energy offensive.

You have the feeling that each day will bring a new challenge/gambit from the McCain camp (What’s next? Jiffy Lube tune-ups for the entire press corps?) and the rest of the day will be spent watching Obama and his media allies trying to swat away the incoming fire.

It is what happens when you take a victory lap months before the first votes are cast.

Wonderful post Wretchard, thanks.

The Air Force has attack pilots for the A-7 and A-10 to name a couple. They were not the kind of flying assignments anyone from the fighter community volunteered for. Those who received such assignments were always rather glum and were teased relentlessly until they transferred. Nevertheless, I don’t think it has anything to do with McCain’s mindset. Being shot down and enduring years of torture in a POW camp certainly did though.

The Iraq War is the most important factor. I have supported the war consistently, but I recognize that the Bush Administration discredited itself horribly by overselling the WMD threat and by its interrogation experiments. It doesn’t matter what I think and argue about these issues. The revelation that the 2001 anthrax attacks were done by a US military researcher is yet another nail in the coffin of the public’s serious concern about WMD threats.

The other important factor is the general rationality of our country’s health-care system. The Republicans have held the Presidency for 20 of the last 28 years and have accomplished practically nothing to rationalize the system. McCain offers nothing new. For many voters, only a Democratic administration will engage this issue with the effort it deserves.

Eventually the health-care issue will raise to prominence in this election campaign, and I expect that this issue will overwhelm the current issue about gasoline prices. Most people are much more worried about medical expenses than they are worried about $4/gallon gasoline.

It seems that a clear majority of the voters is ready and eager to disempower the Rupublicans and to empower the Democrats. That is the most important phenomenon to understand. There has been a massive, significant shift in the electorate’s attitude.

I wish I could say that McCain might turn back that tide, but so far I have not seen him compelling the dissatisfied voters to reconsider fundamental issues. He is not compelling any fundamental debate about the future budget, about future military needs, about the government’s proper role.

Instead, he is talking about himself being honorable and about Obama being a celebrity. There are only four months left to argue the issues effectively, and it looks like McCain might fritter all of them away. McCain doesn’t impress me as a clever, daring dogfighter. He seems to me to be mentally exhausted, reduced to hoping that Obama will make enough mistakes for Obama to lose.

Obama might lose for all the reasons that the above comments point out, and I hope he does lose, but that result will happen only because a significant portion of the electorate decides to split its votes — voting for Democrats in every position but preferring McCain over Obama for President.

That would hardly be a victory for the Republicans. It would hardly be a victory for McCain. Rather, it would merely be a mass decision by the voters to apply some brakes to the Democrats’ momentum for the next four years.