Uh-Oh?

There's a meme racing throughout the starboard side of the blogosphere that the real winner of last night's Messiah-pummeling was not Hillary Rodham Clinton, but rather the RINO pretender, John Sith McCain.  AmSpec is saying it.  Ensign Ed is saying it.  It's got so much momentum, even Limbaugh is succumbing to it.

Rather than the root cause, though, the Obabacle appears to be the culmination of his previous month of stepping on one PR rake after another.  Or so the AP's story goes:

Republicans are no longer underdogs in the race for the White House. To pull that off, John McCain has attracted disgruntled GOP voters, independents and even some moderate Democrats who shunned his party last fall.

Partly thanks to an increasingly likable image, the Republican presidential candidate has pulled even with the two Democrats still brawling for their party’s nomination, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo news poll released Thursday. Just five months ago — before either party had winnowed its field — the survey showed people preferred sending an unnamed Democrat over a Republican to the White House by thirteen percentage points. …

By tracking the same group of roughly 2,000 people throughout the campaign, the AP-Yahoo poll can gauge how individual views are evolving. What’s clear is that some Republican-leaning voters who backed Bush in 2004 but lost enthusiasm for him are returning to the GOP fold - along with a smaller but significant number of Democrats who have come to dislike their party’s two contenders.

Let's restore some badly-needed context to this, shall we?  First of all, you can throw out generic presidential polling a year out from the election, which is every bit as irrelevant as generic congressional polling.  All that reflects is brand loyalty, and the Democrats have been in the ascendancy for nearly three years, so it's hardly surprising that a generic preference poll last fall showed them up by double-digits.

Second, you can also throw out any hypothetical head-to-head matchup before both nominees have been determined.  While more meaningful than a generic survey, it still doesn't reveal much to poll respondents about how they'd break in a McCain-Obama race when Hillary is still very much in the running for the Dem nomination, and vice versa.

Third, and most importantly, the one and ONLY reason that Darth Queeg is perceived as more likeable right now is precisely because of the ongoing brawl in the other party.  He's on the sidelines, not in the fray.  All his weaknesses are shuddered out of public view.  He's not relevant to what's going on.  It's like a triple-threat match where two of the protagonists are pounding the snot out of each other, oblivious to the third contestant who is sitting over in the corner letting them beat each other unconscious in the hopes of scoring an easy pin once one or the other succeeds.

However, what always happens in triple-threat matches is that third participant invariably wades back into the fray prematurely.  Sailor isn't going to do that here, but eventually the Empress and False Messiah (in that order) are going to join forces - mark my words on that - and when they do, intramural season will be over, they'll both turn their attention to defenestrating McCain, as will the Enemy Media, all the Donks who say they'll defect will come home (and will bring more than a few "independents" along with them), and this illusory lead the Sith Master has in these hypothetical matchups will quickly disappear.

Ah, but what about the "disgruntled GOP voters" who are supposedly "coming home"?  Are they really returning to a fold that is, in reality, under enemy occupation?  The demoted one applies this shade of lipstick to the Arizona swine:

Conservatives have begun to consider the disaster of allowing either Obama or Hillary into the White House.  In February, some floated the notion of losing as a means of winning, by having a Carter-style debacle as a new generation’s lesson on electing Democrats.  However, as both Democrats have run more and more to the populist Left, conservatives have started considering the effect on the judiciary and on the economy that either Democrat will have, especially if the Democrats hold Congress.   Obama and Hillary turn out to be the most effective argument for McCain on the Right.

Actually, the argument was never one of "winning by losing"; nor was it a case of "picking up our ball and going home."  It was that John McCain is a Democrat in everything but label, and his usurping of the GOP top spot effectively disenfranchised virtually the entire Republican base, and certainly all conservatives.  It proved that the utter folly of those conservatives who stayed home in 2006 to "teach the Republicans a lesson"; rather than forcing the party hierarchy to pay attention to where it's bread is buttered, they reached for a different loaf.  Now the party that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich built into a majority coalition has been stolen away from us and trundled off right back into center-left irrelevancy.  Which makes John McCain a most fitting standardbearer.

Having not turned out when there was something to lose two years ago, why would Pachyderms come stampeding back when everything is already lost?  That's what makes the "fear factor" such a lame argument.  Remember how GOP poobahs and strategists tried to frighten the base to the polls in '06 by using Crazy Nancy as their scarecrow?  Shall we ask Speaker Boehner if that was a successful gambit?  I'll readily concede that Hillary "Screw Them" Clinton and Barack "GOD DAMN AMERICA" Obama are more effective vehicles of terror, but when has negative motivation ever proven to be an election difference-maker?

Answer: Never.  To win elections, demonizing the other side - or letting them demonize themselves - helps, but it isn't enough.  You have to provide positive reasons to vote FOR your own candidate.  And on the issues that would most motivate GOP voters to go the polls this November - taxes, the courts, and the war - Maverick is, at best, one out of three, and that one - even if it is sincere - may turn back into a liability at the worst possible time.

Sorry, gentlebeings, but I'm not buying the meme.  McCain is NOT "rebuilding the Reagan coalition".  He's rebuilding the Rockefeller coalition, which is a lot smaller.  He spent seven years short-sheeting his own political bed, and he will not escape from it now, now matter how entertaining "Operation Chaos" becomes.  Once Rodbama is born, that juggarnaut will tear through poor ol' Lord Queeg (and his sidekick, Mike Huckleberry) like the Cloverfield monster did Manhattan.

Pachyderms are supposed to have long memories.  I'm betting that's still true.

It's an easy wager to make when you have nothing to lose.

UPDATE: Zell Miller brought the house down at the '04 GOP convention with his fiery keynote address; does anybody really think that poor ol' Joe Lieberman - Sailor's partner in global warming hysteria crime - is going to bolster his good, close, personal friend's right-wing bona fides?