Looks like John McCain picked the wrong election to try to embrace the base.

Last night while watching the PBS series Frontline, I could not help but think about a line from one of my favorite movies, Airplane. The Frontline episode was called The Choice 2008, and told the personal and political biographies of both John McCain and Barack Obama. The show was excellent. I am attaching a link to the series below. You can actually watch the entire episode on-line:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/choice2008/

Now, back to Airplane. The line that I am thinking about was really a running gag that was used by Lloyd Bridges while playing air traffic controller, Steve McCroskey (see video above). The line was, "looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking." The "wrong week" line becomes a running gag - as the emergency escalates, so does the potency of the drug (smoking, drinking, taking amphetamines, sniffing glue).

After watching Frontline, I wondered how things would be now, if the same John McCain who ran for office in 2000 were running today; would he be so far behind Barack Obama in the polls? That McCain was a man who stood up to the conservative base and eventually had his campaign destroyed by them. Now, in 2008, McCain is "embracing the base" and actually being guided by the same staff who put out vicious rumors about him in 2000.

"Anonymous" opponents in 2000 used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

In this election season, people are scared, fed up, and wanting change. Perhaps John McCain model 2000 would actually be doing better than this 2008 version. That McCain would not have chosen a Sarah Palin to be his running mate. He would have gone for someone more like a Joe Lieberman. I know - you hear the Sunday morning pundits say - "but John McCain did not win in 2000." Sure he didn't win, but he is not doing that great now either. He is far behind Obama, even with the supposed support of Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity. To me, it looks like McCain picked the wrong election cycle to "embrace the base."

The more paranoid part of me often wonders whether McCain was actually picked and groomed to lose. Maybe the conservative republican bigwigs felt that this was not the season for a win, and actually used McCain as a patsy in order to assure a strong comeback in four or eight years. I know - all of this talk about paranoia and being a patsy are reminiscent of another movie. I will leave Oliver Stone for another day.

PS - I can't wait to see "W."