McCain's Last Stand

As Barack Obama was promising voters "We're not going to let George Bush pass the torch to John McCain," the GOP candidate himself was in, of all places, Waterloo (Iowa), trying to persuade Tom Brokaw and himself that, on the 41st anniversary of being shot down in Vietnam, his campaign for president was not going down in flames now.

As Brokaw fired off poll numbers, quotes about Sarah Palin's shortcomings and McCain's own words about Bush that evoked the answer, "So do we share a common philosophy of the Republican Party? Of course," the old warrior resolutely insisted on his own version of reality, often using air quotes to denote sarcasm about those who say otherwise and consider Obama preferable.

In this hermetically sealed world, the polls are all wrong except for Zogby (which insists on using a model that forces equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats into an outdated mold) and voters will wake up on November 4th and elect the maverick McCain of 2000.

In this Rip Van Winkle universe, McCain on the economy is FDR in the Great Depression and Harry Truman upsetting Tom Dewey in 1948.

Listening to all this must have been an out-of-body experience for Brokaw, who ended the ordeal with valedictory-like "hope this has been a better Sunday than it was 41 years ago," to which McCain responded, "I appreciate your many years of informing the American people. You've come a long way from South Dakota, but you never forgot where you came from."

So today's Meet the Press ended with an exchange of good wishes by two elderly gentlemen, one of whom will ease back into retirement from TV next year and the other into being the titular head of a minority opposition party from his seat in the US Senate.

Is Rudy Through?

On Wednesday morning, either Rudy Giuliani or John Zogby is going wake up with a big headache. Running fourth in the state on which he has bet his presidential chances, Giuliani is nonetheless sure he's going to prevail in Florida's Tuesday primary.

"We're going to win this election by getting the vote out," Giuliani said at a pizza parlor in Port St. Lucie yesterday. "If we win here, we're going to win the nomination."

Zogby disagrees. "Giuliani is becoming less and less of a factor," he said yesterday, his poll showing John McCain and Mitt Romney tied at 30 percent, Mike Huckabee at 14 and Giuliani at 13, with only 9 percent of voters undecided.

For Zogby, who missed Hillary Clinton's late surge in New Hampshire, another blown call could be professional suicide, so it's safe to assume that his level of confidence in the Florida figures is high.

If he's right, the Giuliani comedy of errors will end this week. After leading in the national polls for a year and raising tons of money, America's Mayor decided to snooze through the early primary states and stake everything on the Sunshine State and its population of New York retirees.

By the time he started campaigning, Giuliani was caked with mud from scandals over his erstwhile partner Bernard Kerik and police protection for his current wife while he was still married to her predecessor.

Meanwhile, McCain, Romney and even Huckabee had picked up momentum, and in the past week, Giuliani lost a couple more points, perhaps as a result of his retired base reading the New York Times endorsement of McCain, sideswiping Rudy thus: "The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power...Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking."

If Zogby's figures hold up, Giuliani's best move would be to get out and get behind McCain. For a career prosecutor, Attorney General would not be a shabby consolation prize, if he could weather confirmation hearings about the shadowy clients of Giuliani Partners.