McCain Is In Big Trouble

The meme is slowly starting to spread. It will become even more apparent once Hillary concedes the race (whenever that is) and Obama unifies the Democratic party.

It boils down to this: John McCain is an incredibly weak candidate. The media isn't profiling his weaknesses, his out-of-touch policies, his love affair with George W. Bush and an endless war in Iraq. Yet Old Man McCain is still basically tied with both Democrats in the polls. And remember, there are a substantial number of Democratic voters, especially on Hillary's side, who are telling pollsters that they would vote for McCain rather than the other Democratic candidate. Most of these voters will eventually migrate back to the left side of the aisle, so McCain's numbers are currently inflated.

I not only wrote about this on March 31st, but I also blogged it at DailyKos on March 19th, just after the Wright story broke.

Here's what I wrote back then:

McCain has had his nomination wrapped up for over a month, his party has consolidated behind him, the President has endorsed him, he hasn't been criticized from the right since Romney dropped out on Feb. 7th, the Democrats are too busy fighting each other, and he has received glowing coverage from his buddies in the media.

Obama, meanwhile, has been attacked from all sides. His primary opponent Hillary Clinton has claimed that McCain would be a better Commander-in-Chief, Saturday Night Live is making him out to be dumber and duller than Bush, viral spam emails are smearing him right and left, and the media has spent the past week endlessly playing incendiary comments from his former pastor.

Given these circumstances, wouldn't you expect McCain to have a 10-15 point lead on Obama right now?

Instead, McCain and Obama are still essentially tied. And this is before, mind you, Obama's great speech has seeped into the electorate. Clearly McCain is a much weaker candidate than anyone has expected, and Barack Obama is much stronger.

Since I wrote that, Obama's polling numbers have actually improved, and McCain's have fallen. And others, like conservative blogger Ross Douthat, are starting to notice:

But by all rights, this ought to be a peak time for McCain's numbers - not the peak, necessarily, but certainly a high point. His right-wing critics are making nice with him, his favorable ratings are sky-high, and his opponents are too busy driving each other's negative ratings upward to spend any time (or money, more importantly) putting a dent in his halo. Moreoever, the Democrats' intra-party tensions are bound to diminish once the party picks a nominee: At least some of the Hillary supporters who tell pollsters that they'd vote for McCain over Obama may actually follow through on that pledge, but a lot of today's McCainocrats will come home to the Democratic fold when all is said and done.

Yet even with all this going for him, McCain's poll numbers are bumping up against the same 45 percent ceiling that they've been hitting since December. If the election were held today - a pretty good day for McCain, all things considered - he'd probably lose to Obama, and might lose to Clinton as well. That doesn't mean he will lose, by any stretch, but it certainly doesn't bode well for November.

Frank Rich at the NY Times has also pegged McCain's weakness:

On the way to the finish line, the prolonged primary race, far from destroying the Democratic candidates, may do more insidious damage to the Republican nominee, lulling his campaign into an unjustified complacency. The Democrats should “take their time — don’t rush,” the McCain aide Mark Salter joked last week. Yet his candidate, as the conservative blogger Ross Douthat pointed out, keeps bumping up against a 45 percent ceiling in the polls even now, when the Democrats are ostensibly in ruins.

Mr. McCain is not only burdened with the most despised president in his own 71-year lifetime, but he’s getting none of the seasoning that he, no less than the Democrats, needs to compete in the fall. Age is as much an issue as race and gender in this campaign. Mr. McCain will have to prove not merely that he can keep to the physical rigors of his schedule and fend off investigations of his ties to lobbyists and developers. He also must show he can think and speak fluently about the domestic issues that are gripping the country. Picture him debating either Democrat about health care, the mortgage crisis, stagnant middle-class wages, rice rationing at Costco. It’s not pretty.

Obama was clearly dinged a bit by the Wright sound bites and the viral smears about his patriotism. But I'm guessing that McCain's association with George W. Bush and the disaster of the last 8 years is going to be a much bigger hindrance than any of this side show stuff. The polls are already showing it. Eventually the rest of the media will catch on.