Too Many McCains

He is outdoing the 1960 Richard Nixon, of whom John F. Kennedy said, "It must be hard getting up every morning and having to decide who you're going to be that day."

In a New York Times column today headed "The McCain of the Week," Gail Collins suggests, "Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)"

Aside from the lying attack ads on Barack Obama, the Republican effort to hold onto the Bush White House has deteriorated into wheeling out a new John McCain with every headline, accompanied by a plastic Palin figure nodding and smiling like a 21st century Pat Nixon with a few lines of actual dopey dialogue.

In the past week alone, McCain has morphed from the champion of free enterprise to an angry populist regulator of Wall Street, from a confident believer in the soundness of the economy followed a redefinition of "fundamentals" as the workers, not the complicated stuff of facts and figures.

Are voters with short memories actually buying all this? The polls are beginning to show an Obama rebound from the Palin bounce, but it would be foolish to discount the wisdom of P. T. Barnum in gauging public shrewdness.

Gail Collins notes that since "McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long."

Not to forget Richard Nixon.