With John McCain tanking, I have sometimes wondered why on earth am I still supporting him.

Giving it some thought, I come up with one answer: I know what I’m getting with the Arizona Senator. I don’t know what I’m getting with Barack Obama.

I know that I am getting a man that supports the environment and that tends to be more gay-friendly than past GOP nominees. I know that I am getting a man that has worked with Democrats and shunned his own party’s narrow interests to work for the national interest. I know that I am getting a grumpy and testy old man, that deep down in a good and decent man.

I don’t know what I am getting in Obama. That’s not to say that he is a bad person, I just don’t know. He doesn’t have a long record. He has not done as much of the bipartisan work that McCain has done. In many ways, he feels like a blank slate.

If we were looking at resumes, then McCain probably has the stronger of the two. But we also tend to look at a lot of other things besides experience. The presidency is a mythic office. Unlike our British cousins who have queen that represents all that is the UK and a Prime Minister that does the day to day grunt work, we Americans wrap both offices into one job. Obama has that mythic quality that befits the office. McCain, doesn’t.

But myth alone doesn’t make one president, nor should it be what makes one choose who to vote for. There needs to be some “there” there to make that man or woman President, or else the myth then becomes a fantasy.

Christopher Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley has chosen to endorse Barack Obama. What is so odd is not his endorsement, but how he got there. This is how he describes John McCain.

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column…”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

Then he explains that John McCain has changed:

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

Well, I agree with him on the Palin nomination, but aside from this, his reasoning seems rather odd. He spends a lot of time talking about the fine qualities of McCain over the last 26 years and then bases his decision on how John McCain has conducted his campaign over the last few months.

Yes, John McCain has thrown some elbows during this campaign (so has Obama), but is that what you should make a decision on: the topsy-turvy world of a campaign? What has happened in the last 6-8 months should not weigh as heavily as the last 30 years, but yet, Buckley does just that.

What’s even odder is why he is supporting Obama:

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

Buckley says nothing about Obama’s positions or his record. It would be one thing if those were the reasons he was supporting the Illinois Senator. But it is a whole other thing to vote for a man because he has a fine temperment.

But what does that have to do with our current economic crisis or Iraq, or global warming?

But it gets better:

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

So, Buckley believes that because Obama is smart and has a good temperament, he won’t use the same-old lefty politics. On what basis does he make this judgement? There is very little evidence to back this up. It seems as if Buckley just has faith that Obama will run govern in a bipartisan fashion.

Buckley seems a mythic character in Obama and fashions his hopes on this man. What Buckley doesn’t see is the man, and frankly, I don’t know what sort of man is he. Please note, I am not saying Obama is a good or bad man, I just don’t know who he is, because there is so little of a record about who this man truly is.

For me, I have to vote on what I know and not vain hope. I know that McCain has worked in a bipartisan fashion and will continue to do so. It’s hard to support someone only on the hope that they won’t govern as a traditional liberal when their past proves that’s what they will probably do.

Some day a few years from now, I think Buckley and other Obamacons will find that Obama is not the man of their dreams. Hope is a good thing to have, but it should not be the only factor in choosing who gets to live in the White House.

Recently I was served a kangaroo dish by my daughter at her home in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. It so happens that the fascinating kangaroo is the national animal of Australia and finds a place of honour on the country’s coat of arms.

On seeing my raised eyebrows, my son-in-law explained: “Don’t worry dad, we are also serving a national cause by opting for a kangaroo dish. It seems that the government would soon be encouraging Australians to have more kangaroo meat instead of cattle and sheep.”

And so it seems. Professor Ross Garnaut, Australian government’s top climate change adviser, has in a major report on global warming noted that kangaroos should gradually replace farm animals for meat because the former emit negligible amounts of methane gas.

This suggestion, coming as it does from the government’s top climate change adviser, provides another excuse to make the Australian national animal a standard restaurant fare.

Professor Garnaut notes: “For most of Australia’s human history of around 60,000 years, kangaroo was the main source of meat. It could again become important.

“The researchers have modelled the potential for kangaroos to replace sheep and cattle for meat production in Australia’s rangelands, where kangaroos are already harvested.

More here…

And here…

Have a look here too…

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I reside in Connecticut.  So, today’s state Supreme Court ruling that overturned the gay marriage ban and the recently passed civil union legislation…well, it doesn’t actually affect me at all.  But it does affect many gay people who would like to get married. ©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights [...]

Long live the typewriter!You will love this.

Not only are they wrong…they’re REALLY wrong. First, here’s McCain’s response to the report… Today’s report shows that the Governor acted within her proper and lawful authority in the reassignment of Walt Monegan. The report also illustrates what we’ve known all along: this was a partisan led inquiry run by Obama supporters and the Palins were completely [...]

Ambivalence rears its ugly head again.McCain/Palin's hate campaign and their supporters' reaction to it ("He's a terrorist! kill him!") are really turning me off. Because I'm in the center and not on the right, I don't find Obama dangerous enough...

There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the emotion being stirred up in the GOP base.  Mostly, it’s manifesting at the McCain or Palin rallies, with shouts of “terrorist” and “socialist” when Barack Obama’s name is mentioned.  Hussein is back as part of the full-name introductions now, and video after video is coming online [...]

Would the late William F. Buckley approve of his son throwing his support behind the most liberal Senator EVER!!!? Something tells me the answer to that would be: possibly. Why? Because I think this has less to do with Obama and more to do with how far McCain has fallen. From The Daily Beast: I have known John McCain [...]

A nasty freak accident today, which we -- which J -- amazingly escaped unscathed. I was driving J uphill from his weekly strength gym workout, which had gone very well, when I was startled by a sort of rending clank...

Color me amazed at the exchanges between Senator McCain and two supporters (well, I don’t know if they will support him after this; thanks to Allahpundit at Hot Air for the video):

I’m 34 years old. So I haven’t been around long enough to see many presidential elections. But has this ever happened before with a presidential candidate; where he/she rhetorically rips the spine out of one or more supporters on national television? That’s what McCain did in the video clip. They expressed their fears of Obama (unjustified in my opinion but the fears are deeply legitimate to them) to McCain and he basically scolds them for that fear. Color me amazed squared.

Part of me is saying, “What in the heck are you doing McCain! Those folks are your base!”. Another part of me feels McCain is a damn brave soul for going after his supporters in front of the camera like this. Either way, the McCain Campaign has entered The Outer Limits of Politics. They Who Control What We See are giving us good stuff:

They have to be. Because I’m totally bamboozled at the turn of events in the presidential race these past several weeks.

"And that's what this campaign is all about." John McCain's answer to a woman who said, "I can't trust Obama. I've read about him and he's . . . he's an Arab."Whatever the motivation -- deep personal revulsion at the...

David Kernell, who pleaded innocent earlier in the week to illegally gaining access to Governor Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo e-mail account, apparently has a history. Kernell, the 20-year-old son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell, lived for a time in Kileen, TX.

Tracey McDaniels, one of his Texas middle-school teachers, remembers him well. “He stood head and shoulders above everybody else… He was the kind of kid you could not forget.” It’s the rest of what McDaniels remembers that promises to complicate Kernell’s present predicament:

“He did the same kind of thing when he went to school here,” said McDaniels, a history teacher at Eastern Hills Middle School. “He and another kid found a way to get onto the school’s server – they just sat down and figured out the password.”…

The 20-year-old son of a state representative in Tennessee, Kernell attended Killeen Independent School District schools from 1999 through 2001, and last month was the focus of an FBI investigation into the hacking of the Alaska governor’s Yahoo e-mail account….

And McDaniels said all of it – the computers and politics – fits well with the seventh-grade student he remembers having in class at Eastern Hills.

“He was in TAG – the talented and gifted class – and he certainly lived up to it,” McDaniels said. “He was one of the smartest kids I ever taught, especially when it came to the social sciences and politics.”

Yesterday I embedded video of an interview with “computer security consultant, author, and renowned former hacker” Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick, who was convicted in 1999, spent five years in prison (eight months of it in solitary confinement), recently signed a book deal for a tell-all about his hacking stunts.

Mitnick is himself evidently still on some watch lists; he was detained at the Atlanta airport in October and released after a trip to Columbia. So he knows from whereof he speaks when he says of Kernell:

It’s unfortunate because it’s a young guy. He did something to probably show off that he can do it, and now he might suffer a felony conviction that will last him the rest of his life.

I get that the kid done wrong. But I think it awfully sad that such a bright young man (an economics major no less; we need them now!) made such a terrible mistake in judgment.

Via TG Daily.

Slate’s Erica S. Perl is on to a clever coping strategy, and one not just for children: “When times are tough, cue the stories about times that were even tougher.” How about Little House on the Prairie 2008? Powered by ScribeFire. ©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved..

Canadians just can’t buy a break from their southern neighbor. Even after all the health care tourists have crossed the border for cheap drugs, the global financial panic has now slithered into national politics. Canada’s conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, is falling victim to opposition-stoked panic that Canada’s prudent financial sector might falter under the [...]

MSNBC has the report… No doubt that the Obama campaign will jump all over this. But will this come up in the next debate? Or will Obama continue to ignore Palin and simply focus on McCain? Seems like Biden might come out and start hammering here on this. So then, what will be the fallout here?

Looks like there was enough “there” there for a 12 person legislative committee to unanimously decide to release this report and find her guilty of ethics abuse. From NY Times: ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state’s public safety commissioner. The investigative [...]

An interesting narrative surrounding the financial crisis that hasn’t gotten much attention is this: Is the near fiscal collapse of the United States the fulfillment of Osama bin Laden’s original plans for the downfall of the United States, laid out in his 1996 Fatwa?

According to Ulrich Ladurner of the German newspaper Die Zeit, that is exactly how he and his followers see it. Ladurner writes in part:

“Since the United States is experiencing a crisis of monumental proportions, Osama must genuinely feel that his prophecy has become a reality. More than a decade ago, he set out to vanquish America and its villainous puppets in the Arabian Gulf - nothing more, nothing less. Back then this must have appeared like folly, because the U.S. was at the zenith of its power and Osama and his people were considered nothing more than a fanatical gang of murderers.

“Today we are witnessing the rapid decline of the United States, a trend which some consider to be irreversible. Osama has victory in his sights. Whether that’s true or not shouldn’t be debated here. This is about recognizing that this is the view of Osama bin Laden. This is about catching a glimpse of the world of ideas espoused by these fanatics.”

An interesting if disturbing article.

By Ulrich Ladurner

Translated By James Jacobson

October 8, 2008

Germany - Die Zeit - Original Article (German)

If Osama bin Laden is still alive, these days are happy ones for him. He must be saying to his supporters: “You see, our mortal enemy is dying!” Everyone will nod approvingly and go on greedily absorbing all the news from the United States. Every subsequent crash on the stock market will illicit the words: “Allah is Great!”

Since the United States is experiencing a crisis of monumental proportions, Osama must genuinely feel that his prophecy has become a reality. More than a decade ago, he set out to vanquish America and its villainous puppets in the Arabian Gulf - nothing more, nothing less. Back then this must have appeared like folly, because the U.S. was at the zenith of its power and Osama and his people were considered nothing more than a fanatical gang of murderers.

Today we are witnessing the rapid decline of the United States, a trend which some consider to be irreversible. Osama has victory in his sights. Whether that’s true or not shouldn’t be debated here. This is about recognizing that this is the view of Osama bin Laden. This is about catching a glimpse of the world of ideas espoused by these fanatics.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated and English-language foreign press coverage of the unfolding financial crisis.

Giving credit where credit is due, McCain is finally addressing the tone of some of his recent gatherings and trying to tell the crowds that Obama is not a scary guy. The only problem? The mob doesn’t care. From Politico: “I am enthusiastic and encouraged by the enthusiasm and I think it’s really good,” McCain said. “We have [...]

McCain - 49% Obama - 46% MOE: +/-4 Is this an outlier? Well, FiveThirtyEight gives the poll a weight of 0.89, and that means it’s not nearly as reliable as other polls like Gallup’s daily, which carries a weight of 1.76. Still…any poll numbers that show a lead this small for McCain at this point in the race has [...]

About 45 minutes ago, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson held a news conference to announce the latest plan of the Bush administration to mitigate the U.S. and global financial crisis.

One of the elements of the plan is to buy stock in financial institutions from a broad array of institutions.

According to AP’s Martin Crutsinger, Paulson said “the government’s program would be designed to complement the efforts of banks to raise fresh capital from private sources…the government’s stock purchases would be of nonvoting shares so that the government will not have power to run the companies.

And,

The purchase of equity stakes in companies would be in addition to the main thrust of the $700 billion rescue effort, which involves purchasing distressed assets off the books of financial institutions as a way of unthawing frozen credit markets and getting banks to resume more normal lending operations

Let’s hope this, something, anything works.

CNN and MSNBC, and probably other networks, interrupted their regular programming for this breaking news. Fox News, in the middle of their Brit Hume panel discussion (Brit wasn’t there), didn’t “bat a TV eye,” nor mentioned a word about the news conference, but–after a commercial break–continued with an “ACORN” report (and alleged ties to Obama) throughout the entire time that Paulson was speaking to the nation, and to the world, about one of the worst financial crises we have ever faced.

The tone of the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has begun to trouble some moderate Republicans and some other Republicans. Note this piece from the Grand Rapids Press:

He endorsed John McCain in the presidential primary, but now former Republican Gov. William Milliken is expressing doubts about his party’s nominee.

“He is not the McCain I endorsed,” said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. “He keeps saying, ‘Who is Barack Obama?’ I would ask the question, ‘Who is John McCain?’ because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.

“I’m disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues.”

Milliken, a lifelong Republican, is among some past leaders from the party’s moderate wing voicing reservations and, in some cases, opposition to McCain’s candidacy.

Some conservative Republicans will dismiss his criticism as “well, he’s just a RINO!” which is part of the problem: the Republican Party under George W. Bush, as engineered by strategist Karl Rove, has marginalized moderate Republicans who have now become people almost without a party — dismissed as people who are “just” RINOs. McCain had retained the respect of many moderate Republicans up until this White House run because the pre-2008 version of McCain didn’t strictly adhere to the conservative base line.

Milliken is not alone:

During a stop in Grand Rapids on Thursday, Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican U.S. senator from Rhode Island, said he’s voting for Obama and urging others to do likewise.

McCain campaigned for Chafee’s unsuccessful re-election bid in 2006, but Chafee said he is concerned McCain has swung to the right, a divisive strategy that could make it difficult for him to govern.

“That’s not my kind of Republicanism,” said Chafee, who now calls himself an independent. “I saw what Bush and Cheney did. They came in with a (budget) surplus and a stable world, and look what’s happened now. In eight short years they’ve taken one peaceful and prosperous world, and they’ve torn it into tatters.”

As for McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for his running mate, “there’s no question she’s totally unqualified,” Chafee said.

He had similar reservations about Obama’s lack of experience, but said the Democrat’s handling of the campaign convinced him he’s ready to lead.

Chafee said he has spoken with several other moderate Republican leaders, and “there are a whole lot of us deserting.”

The ranks of the loudly-defecting now include the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley. His column should be read in full but here are some key parts:

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column…”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

For Buckley, this is reason for sadness:

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

If McCain wins, his 2008 face will be the face of the Republican Party. McCain could indeed be figuring that, if he wins, once he’s in power, he can shift back to the 2000 McCain. But as his increasingly-menacing campaign rallies have shown, he has unleashed some disturbed genies from bottles now and he is unlikely to get them easily back inside again.

If he goes down to defeat, then it’ll be time for the traditional conservatives who are true descendants of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan — those more concerned about ideas and ideologies, rather than hate-arousing rhetoric masking as partisanship aimed to whip up the party faithful to run to the polls to save the country from opponents defined as dangerous-to-the-Republican demons, fellow travelers of terrorists or traitors — to lock horns with the remaining party moderates to refurbish the GOP.

P.S. Several writers on this site are or have been moderate Republicans. Several have been longtime admirers of John McCain. At least one independent voter on TMV changed party registration to vote for him in 2000. The independently-written and usually-unedited posts here reflect the same kinds of shifts and conclusions that Milliken and Chaffee experienced.

Increasingly, the 2008 McCain is to the 2000 McCain what New Coke was to Coke Classic.

Obama is now polling, according to the RCP average, at 6.6 points above McCain, which is just above his highpoint coming out of the Democratic National Convention and a 9.2 point flip from McCain’s post-election bounce. Battleground polling also brings dismal news to McCain. Of the 8 states deemed toss-ups, Obama leads in 5, including Florida [...]

The last few days, I’ve been very critical of the McCain camp — and by extension Sen. McCain — for their potentially mob-inciting rhetoric.

And while I seriously doubt Senator McCain reads TMV, much less anything I write, somehow, the message got through, at least a little. Sadly, the mob won’t let it go.

I know some of you won’t be as forgiving, but at this point, I honestly pity the Senator, and I suspect he has learned another in a series of painful life lessons. No matter your party or allegiance, I hope you’ll agree that it’s all such an incredible shame.

Mike Keefe, The Denver Post

Warning, may cause cavities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NPrLvwf_QY ©2008 PoliGazette. All Rights Reserved..

The Washington Times published an article on Friday which claims, and provides quite some compelling evidence, that Barack Obama tried to convince Iraqi officials not to agree to any kind of withdrawal deal with President George W. Bush. Obama told representatives of the Iraqi government, several of them told the WaTi, that they should wait until [...]

In a time like this, what kind of message are you sending to the American people when you’ll go on NBC’s comedy show, but you refuse to be interviewed by NBC’s journalists? Still, I suppose this is somehow ironically appropriate given the seriousness of her as a VP pick. From NY Post: SOCCER moms and Joe Sixpacks, listen [...]

Although Norm Coleman is a sitting Senator for the state of Minnesota, he is running an uphill battle for reelection nonetheless. He is currently trailing his main competitor Al Franken in the polls, and he is seriously harmed by the candidate of the Independent Party, Dean Barkley. The last week was especially gruesome for Coleman after [...]

Remember earlier in the year when Obama was accused of playing the race card for predicting Republicans would try to scare voters into thinking “he’s not like us.” A lot of people are now giving him credit for his prescience, but honestly how hard is it to predict McCain’s game plan when he’s relying on the same playbook that Republicans have used the last two elections?

McCain has one last Hail Mary option that might work. He can fire Steve Schmidt and all other reminiscences of Karl Rove that are currently running his campaign into the ground and publicly apologize to the American people for losing control. He then has to promise to take the high road from here on out, and actually follow through.

Sure, it might be seen as another stunt, but revamping his staff has worked for him before. Although he has lost a lot of credibility in the last few weeks, his former image as an honest maverick might be lingering around enough to make him seem sincere. And what does he really have to lose? Negative character attacks aren’t working. Why not try the opposite?

I’m not saying I would buy it. But it’s something that a lot of voters—probably including Obama—wouldn’t see coming.