Well, this country is brain-dead, for starters. People know that they’re really pissed off, but they can’t quite entirely figure out what to be pissed off about. They know, above all, that they’re hurting financially and that’s pretty much most of what counts for them. (You mean there’s still a war going on in Iraq? Oh. That’s in South America, right?) But too many of them haven’t figured out that McCain and his party are absolutely the reason why their wallets have been on a diet for decades now.

It wouldn’t hurt, either, if there was an opposition party in this country that actually, er, opposed every once in a while. Heck, at this point they could do it just for the novelty effect. Not everybody takes the time to study political issues. Not everybody in a shrinking middle-class economy has the time. Damn few have been educationally equipped to think things through with some measure of clarity. (Is it just me, or does the fact that all this helps right-wing demagogues remain in power seem a wee bit too coincidental?). That’s where the opposition comes in. You need a bit of a narrative from some folks in high positions who are supposed to know better and represent the interests of working stiffs in order to help people to figure this all out. You need the occasional FDR or Bobby Kennedy or Paul Wellstone to come along and lay out the arguments. Heck, nowadays, even a Hubert Humphrey could be helpful.

Think of how unbelievably lucky it is for McCain that the other side isn’t fighting back. And, in fact, that the other side really isn’t even an other side at all. Could the Republican Party possibly have made a bigger hash of things than they have? And, yet, there’s Ol’ McCain, right up there in the polls. He doesn’t even have youth, charisma or good looks going for him, either!

And then there’s the ongoing saga of Hillary and Barack, which just seems to be more intractable every week, just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get more gridlocked. Yep, Sheeeee’s baaaaaack! As every day passes, as every primary and caucus goes by, as every cheap political ploy is played, and every self-serving attention-deprived wanker out there seeks their 15 minutes of fame, the party skirts ever closer to imploding into a mushroom cloud. Let’s face it, Hillary’s cold, dead fingers are gonna have to be pried off of the nomination, one by one, before she’s ever gonna let go. At the very least, she appears to be determined to destroy Obama for 2012. He, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have any of that rampant egoism infecting both Clintons or McCain, such that they simply require the presidency to maintain their psychological stability. Unfortunately, though, he’s earned it more than she has, by a significant margin. How long can his nice guy shtick last when they’re stealing it right out of his hands? It looks to me like whoever loses this thing is going to be highly tempted to take their marbles and go home, leaving McCain free to waltz right in. And, in Obama’s case, I wouldn’t even blame him if he did.

McCain’s other great luck is that he is a Republican. The party is congenitally incapable of running anything other than a vicious campaign. So they will. Again. And it will very likely benefit them. Again. People can say all they want about how they don’t like negative campaigning, but I have just two words for anyone who makes that claim. One of them is ‘George’ – can you guess the other?

The great irony of this is that, should McCain actually pull this off, he will almost assuredly be the proud owner of a completely disastrous one-term presidency. The case of another John – this one called Major – who inherited Margaret Thatcher’s job after her own party dumped her, is instructive, but would pale in comparison. Major somehow miraculously eked out an electoral victory in 1992, gaining himself a five-year term of his own. It’s likely that the first day of that term was the happiest of all for the prime minister. It went straight downhill from there, and he was basically left to run out the clock as a caretaker, equally loathed by the opposition, the public, and his own party.

McCain would likely be in the same position, only far worse. This country is going to be facing crisis after crisis in the next four years. Half of them will be Bush-induced, and the other half will be Bush-ignored. Either way, there will be hell to pay. McCain will absolutely be caught between the Scylla of his and his party’s own destructive ideology, and the Charybdis of mounting disaster and a public increasingly fuming at another four years of Bushism. He would have one possible option to save his presidency, from what I can see, which would be to abandon his own party and ally with Democrats in Congress, adopting a center-left agenda.

It’s even slightly conceivable that he would actually do it. McCain’s not nearly the ‘maverick’ the media love to brand him as, but at the same time there’s no love lost between him and the Neanderthals who run his party. You can also tell, when he let’s down his guard sometimes, that he is far less a right-wing kook at his core than a fairly pure opportunist. Once ensconced in the White House for four years, and with a crumbling right-wing agenda sucking him down, it’s possible he could pull a Mitterrand-style U-turn. I seriously doubt it, and there would be hell to pay for it if he did. But it is possible. And it would certainly be his only possible route to success.

Not such a good scenario, eh? For the country, that is. For McCain, if you just simply need to add your name to the history books as Number Forty-Four, well then, Woo-Hoo! You’re there.

The luck of the Irish blood coursing through his veins might just get him the presidency, after all, despite long odds against it, some of them of his own making.

The rest of us would be just a bit less lucky in that scenario.

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