Cheer Up, Obamafiles: McCain Has His Own Headaches

Hey - I know some of you are down in the dumps bout Obama's polling and the effectiveness of the McCain's Rovian negative campaign.

But cheer up. At least we don't have a rabid far-left base that is nixing our guy's best strategic choices for VP, as McCain does on the far-right.

McCain's putting Lieberman on the ticket (who's been auditioning for it) - or possibly, even better, Olympia Snowe, a pro-choice female Republican - would be his passport to the Presidency. They would defuse the idea that McCain is captive to far right-wing elements of the party and could reinforce the image of the old McCain of 2000, a man with his own ideas.

But apparently, the right-wingers are putting the kibosh on the idea. And McCain IS captive to the far right.

So while Obama may have the netroots nit-picking Bayh (who is by far not Obama's only option), McCain seems to be seriously constrained for a breakthrough VP selection by his own party. So even if McCain goes down the middle for an independent ticket, he'd seriously alienate a core segment of his own party, creating a rift and anti-McCain media storm at least as great, if not greater, than the anti-Obama PUMA's. And his net gain from such a move would be erased.

So it's back to the "safe" VP calculus for McCain now.

Well. It's quite obvious McCain would love to put his buddy Lieberman in there with him, and Lieberman is itching to finally realize the label of full-boiled traitor that he's been cultivating these past years. Would have been a pretty picture. And though I think it would be Snowe, not Lieberman, that would be McCain's strategic coup de grace, McCain only has his Rovian handlers to blame for this predicament now. They're the ones who created a political calculus based on stirring up the passions of the far right. Now they're held captive by it.

So finally, at last, some small smidgen of poetic justice.