Kristol to McCain: Don't Worry, Be Happy

Charles Krauthammer has written that John McCain has already exceeded his "two Hail Mary's per campaign rule." McCain tossed one long TD when he backed the surge in Iraq in the dark days of 2006. Everybody but McCain, President Bush and General Petraeus said it wouldn't work. It did and the Iraq war turned around miraculously. Hail Mary II was picking Sarah Palin from obscurity as his VP choice.

Despite the MSM's wolfpack attacks, the American people still love Sarah amidst all the bad press so Palin is Hail Mary TD No. 2.

Since then, nothing has gone well for McCain and even the economy has conspired against him with the housing credit crisis sucking all the air out of the campaign. With the constant media drumbeat of the impending return of the Great Depression, panic is infecting voters as well as the stock market. But the polls are still tight, showing a slight trend toward McCain and away from Obama's "inevitable win." Today's record surge on Wall Street may mean the sun is shining again on McCain. I can hope.

Yet William Kristol says it's time for one more Hail Mary from McCain: Fire the Campaign and do the unthinkable, go positive to voting day.

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.

Most on the right are saying McCain has been too much Mr. Nice Guy, time to take to take the gloves off. The left, hypocrites all, are accusing him of running the worst scorched-earth campaign since Attila the Hun, ignoring all the bile spewing daily from their own ranks.

J.R. Dunn of American Thinker is of the "right" persuasion, urging a campaign closer based on Obama's Three Strikes consisting of Bomb-Throwin' Bill Ayers and his equally psychotic wife Bernadine Dohrn, ACORN voter fraud and The New Party socialist revolution.

A terrorist bomber, what may be the largest vote-fraud operation in history, and a political party calling for a socialist revolution in the United States. Obama has certainly been a busy little bee -- though not too busy, it seems, to cover his tracks in all three cases. As well he might -- anybody with such a history has a few questions to answer. And Obama knows this full well, considering the effort he's put into ducking those exact questions since his campaign began.

But those questions must be asked and answered before November 4^th. Which, needless to say, is a job for Superwoman. Sarah Palin's relentless hammering brought the Ayers story back to the surface. She must now tie the three strands together: Ayers, ACORN, the New Party, and pound at it until it can no longer be ignored. (Of course, this will be an extremely upsetting experience for Kathleen Parker and David Brooks, but that can't be helped.)

If the three can be bundled, and the resulting package adequately presented to the American people, Barack Obama is through. American voters have made it clear time and again that they have no use for the political extremes of either left or right. Obama plainly suffers, at best, from a weakness for crackpot left-wing politics, and at worst from a yearning to create a revolutionary situation in American society. The first reveals an immature personality, one easily led and given to romantic concepts of how the world works. The second is evidence of serious maliciousness.

We require neither in the oval office.

And somewhere between right and left, there's Bill Kristol, urging a Monty Python: Now for something totally different. Who knows, maybe The Maverick will zig and not zag.

So why not go for Hail Mary number whateveritis? I can't help but remember another "Happy Warrior," Hubert Humphrey, who never won the big race. A fella named Richard Nixon whipped him soundly.

But what do I know? I'm the stupid schmuck who said the voters weren't stupid enough to vote for Bill Clinton. I was wrong then. Twice.