....commentary from conservative pundit George Will:

WASHINGTON -- Time was, the Baltimore Orioles manager was Earl Weaver,
a short, irascible, Napoleonic figure who, when cranky, as he frequently
was, would shout at an umpire, "Are you going to get any better or is
this it?" With, mercifully, only one debate to go, that is the question
about John McCain's campaign.

In the closing days of his 10-year quest for the presidency, McCain
finds it galling that Barack Obama is winning the first serious campaign
he has ever run against a Republican. Before Tuesday night's uneventful
event, gall was fueling what might be the McCain-Palin campaign's
closing argument. It is less that Obama has bad ideas than that Obama is
a bad person.

This, McCain and ++his female Sancho Panza** say, is demonstrated by bad
associations Obama had in Chicago, such as with William Ayers, the
unrepentant terrorist. But the McCain-Palin charges have come just as
the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing it is not paying
for. Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes
containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other
retirement accounts -- telling each household its portion of the nearly
$2 trillion that Americans' accounts have recently shed. In this
context, the McCain-Palin campaign's attempt to get Americans to focus
on Obama's Chicago associations seem surreal -- or, as a British
politician once said about criticism he was receiving, "like being
savaged by a dead sheep."

Recently Obama noted -- perhaps to torment and provoke conservatives --
that McCain's rhetoric about Wall Street's "greed" and "casino culture"
amounted to "talking like Jesse Jackson." What fun: one African-American
Chicago politician distancing himself from another African-American
Chicago politician by associating McCain with him.

After their enjoyable 2006 congressional elections, Democrats eagerly
anticipated that 2008 would provide a second election in which a chaotic
Iraq would be at the center of voters' minds. Today they are glad that
has not happened. The success of the surge in Iraq, for which McCain
justly claims much credit, is one reason why foreign policy has receded
to the margins of the electorate's mind, thereby diminishing the subject
with which McCain is most comfortable and which is Obama's largest
vulnerability.

Tuesday night, McCain, seeking traction in inhospitable economic
terrain, said that the $700 billion -- perhaps it is $800 billion, or
more; one loses track of this fast-moving target -- bailout plan is too
small. He proposes several hundred billions more for his American
Homeownership Resurgence -- you cannot have too many surges -- Plan.
Under it, the government would buy mortgages that homeowners cannot --
or perhaps would just rather not -- pay, and replace them with cheaper
ones. When he proposed this, conservatives participating in MSNBC's
"dial group" wrenched their dials in a wrist-spraining spasm of disapproval.

Still, it may be politically prudent for McCain to throw caution, and
billions, to the wind. Obama is competitive in so many states that
President Bush carried in 2004 -- including Florida, North Carolina,
Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico -- it is not
eccentric to think he could win at least 350 of the 538 electoral votes.

If that seems startling, that is only because the 2000 and 2004
elections were won with 271 and 286, respectively. In the 25 elections
1900-1996, the winners averaged 402.6. This, even though the 1900 and
1904 elections -- before Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma attained
statehood, and before the size of the House was fixed at 435 members in
1911 -- allocated only 447 and 476 electoral votes, respectively. The 12
elections from 1912 through 1956, before Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood,
allocated only 531.

In the 25 twentieth-century elections, only three candidates won with
fewer than 300 -- McKinley with 292 in 1900, Wilson with 277 in 1916 and
Carter with 297 in 1976. President Harry Truman won 303 in 1948 even
though Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat candidacy won 39 that otherwise would
have gone to Truman. After John Kennedy won in 1960 with just 303, the
average winning total in the next nine elections, up to the 2000
cliffhanger, was 421.4.

In 1987, on the eve of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's third victory,
the head of her Conservative Party told a visiting columnist: "Someday,
Labour will win an election. Our job is to hold on until they are sane."
Republicans, winners of seven of the last 10 presidential elections, had
better hope they have held on long enough.




++Sarah Palin is Sancho Panza...priceless.

Sancho was the illiterate sidekick of Don Quixote.