Mud Will Be Flung Tonight

With eight days to go, John McCain's campaign clearly realizes it's over. Staffers have begun circulating their resumés, a senior McCain aide accused Sarah Palin of "going rogue," and the finger-pointing is rampant over at campaign HQ.

McCain and Palin have absolutely nothing positive to say on their own behalf - and that was before the story of Palin's $150,000 luxury shopping spree (paid for by the Republican Party) broke.

Remember John Edwards' infamous $400 haircut, about which the GOP spent weeks fulminating? The McCain campaign outspent him by 37,500%.

And the wretched excess for this supposed "plain folk hockey mom" just keeps on going - during just the first two weeks in October, the party shelled out $22,800 on Palin's makeup and another $10,000 on hairstyling. With Newsweek reporting that many GOP donors are "furious" over how their contributions were spent, the party seems in real danger of alienating their most deep-pocketed backers.

So the campaign has gone all-in on the mudslinging.

Palin's appeal last week to the "pro-America" parts of the country blew up in her face and she was forced to apologize, but the campaign continues to depict Barack Obama as a threatening Other. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who last distinguished herself by bragging that her Minnesota constituents have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, even called Obama "anti-American" and demanded a media exposé of similar senators and representatives.

A few weeks ago, Obama told the much-exploited "Joe the Plumber" that he wants to "spread the wealth around" rather than have it concentrated in only a few hands. So naturally, the McCain campaign seized on Obama's comment to paint him as some sort of secret Communist. The usual suspects (Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, etc) did their jobs admirably, parroting GOP talking points ad nauseum. Orlando TV reporter Barbara West even quoted Karl Marx's famous definition of Socialism ("from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs") and asked Joe Biden on Thursday, "how is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?" (Biden's response was to laugh and ask, "Is this a joke? Or is that a real question?")

So now we see what the GOP really boils down to. With all their usual wedge issues (terrorism, gay marriage, etc) having failed, with a barely-there candidate and a loose-cannon running mate, and with an economy in which income inequality in some major American cities is at third-world levels, all they have left is hate and fear. But the more hate and fear the GOP unleashes at Democrats, the more the American people turn away in revulsion.

Of course, the Republicans haven't yet figured that out. And the longer they take, the bigger the Democratic victory next week will be.