The guy you thought you saw in 2000 never existed. He's never been a straight-talking maverick. He's never been a moderate. He's never been not George W. Bush. He's pretty much always been a self-serving, cynical, mean-spirited hack. In 2000 he thought the best way to get ahead was to pander to the moderates; in 2008 he thought the best way to get ahead was to pander to the right wing. (If we're lucky, of course, he will have been wrong both times.) He has never in his life had a shred of principle, from the day when he betrayed his country by making propaganda films for the North Vietnamese right down to today.

His ambition to be president was stronger than his desire to do what was right. At every juncture of his campaign when faced with a choice between what he thought was right and what he thought would win him the presidency, he's chosen the latter. His shame and dishonor will stain his legacy.

No pity.

I wondered when someone would write an essay about this.

Once McCain won in South Carolina, I never could figure out why he felt he had to pander to the Right. Any idiot could have told him that he'd never win independents pandering to the crazy Uncle in the GOP attic.

I think you're right, Walter. Had McCain run a better version of his 2000 primary campaign, Obama would be sweating now.

I always thought McCain would tack to the center, but he never did. Which is really, really weird.

I can come up with only two notions: 1) McCain is just not a very good candidate. He's also 8 years older, and slower, and, frankly, he sounds it on the stump. He sounds bad. If he's not suffering some physiological problems with his mental faculties, I'd be quite surprised.

I mean no disrespect. I feel sad for him if he's going down that way...but I do not feel sad that he's losing. He's a dangerous disgrace to his profession.

but, far more significant 2) I suspect there's no one left in the GOP who could have helped McCain run a "true maverick" campaign. It would have required parsing the issues with an intelligence and a cunning that the GOP appears not to possess. I don't think Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis understand how to run a campaign like that.

So, when the history is written here, I think it'll be clear that McCain might have won a squeaker as a true rebel against Bush, but the GOP didn't know how to do something that subtle.

I also agree with Daniel Dvorkin, with the caveat that McCain probably really did have some genuine differences with the Bush wing of the GOP.. he simply didn't understand how to underline those differences in 2008 in a way that could help him...or, as Dvorkin says, he just didn't give a shit and was doing whatever he thought he had to do to win. I can believe that. Bad choice, that.

You touched and helped me understand those weird inner "icky feelings" McCain has given off this election cycle.

For us moderate Republicans, battered as we are by the Bush Boys, the 2008 McCain was like discovering that your favorite aunt manufactures meth when she isn't walking the streets.

The whole maverick thing was invented by the media, and they need to stop perpetuating the myth that McCain the honorable POW maverick has been kidnapped and brianwashed by a mean-spirited, petty candidate named McCain/Palin.

My neighbors used to be huge McCain fans. They liked his courage, his independence, and his straightforward image; they also hated the slimy tactics used against him in the 2000 GOP primary. They'd have voted for him in a heartbeat if he'd have run a reasonably clean campaign and picked a competent running mate.

Now, they say it's as if the RNC replaced McCain with a pod person. They barely recognize him these days. In his ambition and quest for power, he's become everything that he'd earlier claimed to hate. Picking Palin as VP particularly turned them off, and the nasty race-baiting campaign sealed the deal. Needless to say, they're both planning to vote for Obama.

I have a feeling that this scenario has played out a great many times this year.

Like many people I read salon as well as huffington post (along with slate, etc.)

Mitchell Bard wrote an article about the four fears of this election that keep him up at night

To comment I quoted Chris Rock who said "Obama keeps acting like if he wins the enough states it's gonna mean something"

In this same vein I said that I fear that if the race isn't close enough for the Republicans to steal through Election fraud (like 2000) that perhaps Bush would go so far as to invent some kind of new terrorist threat (or, forgive me for even suggesting this, but the most paranoid part of me fears an attack of some kind perpetrated on the American populace) --which he would then use as a reason to suspend elections.

I was promptly banned from commenting. Immediately.

Look, it's not that I think that will happen (and God knows I hope that it doesn't),

but after 2000 and 2004 is it really so absurd to voice the possibility that it would?

The fact that my fears were silenced worries me even more.

Any thoughts?

In High Fidelity, John Cusak goes to a party at the Chicago home of Charlie, his College Love who left him for another more "alive" person. After the party he realizes that Charlie is boring and that what he had in College was an infatuation.

Mr. Shapiro, as with David Brooks and a school bus full of childish cub reporters, had a crush on the man who was so good, so funny, so pure and so "all that and more."

They were so infatuated they never stopped to ask what he really believed. And so these incurious frat boys sat and ate the donuts and loved the stories about the Brazilian stripper and all those fly boy tales. They imagined, I suppose, that McCain was Tom Cruise and he came to love Kelly McGinnis after all. And they even told his stories for him: The silly tale that South Carolina was a place where his refusal to give up honor cost him the cockpit on Air Force 1. No one could bother to note the "race men" who ran his SC Campaign or that McCain went on to win primaries after SC. Such facts didn't fit.

And so today we listen as one silly reporter after another tells us as did David Brooks that "McCain is a really smart man, a very funny man when he is himself, and of course a victim of bad advice." McCain it seems holds fast to the notion that he should judged not by his actions but by what everyone just knows to the real McCain.

Mr. Shapiro fell in love with a dashing flyboy. Such romances, as some men and women come to know are not susceptible to logic, fact, observation and rational analysis. Unfortunately, it seems that reporters who were "on the bus" are still chasing the image they created when they were young and love was indeed just a pretty face.

Sad that.