John McCain, Underachiever Extraordinaire

Johnnie, we hardly knew ye before George viciously trampled you underfoot in that rather humiliating pas de deux of 2000.

Since then, with George as your Father Superior, issuing party dicta from ahigh, you've mostly managed to behave yourself as the obedient altar boy. Sure, you had your incorrigible moments early on, such as when you protested his insanely otherworldly, deficit-defying tax cuts, but you returned to the fold soon enough.

There was always 2008, and you needed his sheep. Best to lie low -- or bend over -- and go with the political Zeitgeist. But oh how that strategy has failed you.

You never dreamed the party faithful and other hangers on would become this disaffected with George's reactionary liturgy, or that Hillary wouldn't be here to so easily kick around anymore, or that a gleaming Pied Piper of Change would come along to lure the masses and stomp the bloody hell out of all that preceded him.

No, you, Johnnie, stuck to your adopted ideological guns in the gauzy hope that allegiance to George would firm up a good 40 percent. It would then be a simple matter of target practice on the middle 20.

Well, the best laid plans, as they say.

So now, according to The Politico ...

The Republican reformer is back.

"The McCain campaign," reports the online publication, "believes that by carrying the reform mantle in the general election, he will appeal to independent voters -- and potentially undercut presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s change theme."

Isn't this a trifle late? Talk about barn doors and the closing thereof after the mass-exodus fact and all that.

But there's far more than just the inexcusable tardiness issue. For as the Politico further reports, the McCain campaign -- so far, anyway -- is venturing forth idiosyncratically only on the issue of campaign finance reform.

Yes, you read that right. "Campaign finance reform" -- the one issue, however thunderingly critical to democracy's future, that fails to even peep over the edge of public opinion polls on assorted matters of grave concern.

McCain and his advisers' near blindness to all that is swirling about them is truly exceptional. This team of message misfits not only landed on the one issue that virtually no one outside the ideologically reactionary Inner Sanctum cares about -- which may be sad, but factual -- but also managed to pick the one issue that the Inner Sanctum actually cares feverishly about -- in opposition, of course.

And that's the species of tunnel vision that has helped put John McCain behind the eight ball. It's not all a matter of Obama's dominance; it's unquestionably a matter, as well, of McCain's incompetence.

That image and the numbers that follow it are beginning to solidify rather unappetizingly for McCain, and this is damn early in a general campaign for any such solidification. Yet ...

"Overall," according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, "the Democrat has a lead of 50 percent to 42 percent over Republican Sen. John McCain among registered voters nationwide, lifted by a big edge among women [thank you, Hillary], and he has also regained an edge among political independents [thank you, FISA and OPEC]."

Excluding some monumentally intervening event, those electoral contours aren't destined to change much, except possibly transmogrify for John McCain. And that's not just my opinion; there are a lot of Republican strategists in full agreement.

Which makes me wonder why a few of them, or at least the brilliant strategist Mike Murphy of McCain's 2000 insurgency (who knew how to amplify "reform" far beyond campaign finance), have been elbowed from positions of sensible counsel -- counsel that undoubtedly would urge McCain to do something -- anything -- radically unorthodox.

And his reengaged advocacy of campaign finance reform sure ain't it.

Yesterday the New York Times reported that economist Richard Moody has warned clients, in perspicacious language more social than scientific, that "There’s not enough lipstick to put on this pig." But perhaps Moody wasn't really thinking of the economy. Perhaps, subconsciously, he had in mind the McCain campaign.