Homing In on the White House

With thousands of American families losing their homes to foreclosure every week, it's depressing to see presidential candidates in a food fight about how many residences John McCain possesses and how much help Barack Obama got from a fixer in buying his own.

Technically, McCain may be homeless, since none of the eight places he hangs his hat belongs to him but to his wife, children and trusts she controls, but haggling about that may strike voters desperate to avoid losing the places they live as not quite relevant to their concerns.

The hoo-ha about homes is symptomatic of the freefall from focusing on issues and turning the election into a barroom brawl that Rovian Republicans started with their attack ads and McCain's badmouthing of Obama to which the Democrats are now responding with kneecapping of their own.

Ironically, it was Cindy McCain, owner of the houses and condos in question, who started out by making it clear that she and her husband kept their finances separate and that she had no intention of telling the world about her own.

At the same time, she was adamant that, after all the sliming her family suffered in 2000, that this campaign would be different.

“We'd rather not win than to have to do that,” Mrs. McCain said last spring. “That's not worth winning for. This is about being a leader and a person that can be a good example for our children, and a good role model. There are many, many, many more things to this job than just being the president. You are an example. You have to--you have to be better than that. You have to be.”

She said she had asked her husband after the 2000 race not to try again for the presidency if it meant enduring all the attacks and slanders. But here we are, and this time it's John McCain who has found a home with the Republican politics of personal destruction.

The True Test for McCain

As a Karl Rove protégé takes charge of his faltering campaign, a character question comes up: Does John McCain have it in him to get into the mud to win ugly?

Repelled by Rovian tactics in 2000 to the point of openly considering switching parties, McCain is clearly under pressure now to sign on to smearing Obama with the kind of dirt that did him in back then and the Swiftboating of John Kerry that he deplored in 2004.

Up to now, McCain has been willing to shift positions on issues to mollify the Republican Right and win the nomination but he clearly drew a line at personal attacks on his rivals in the primaries.

Now, amid all the talk about sharpening his message, the Republican standard bearer faces a different reality: With all the baggage of the Bush years, there is very little likelihood that McCain can win this election on policy issues, no matter how adroitly he frames them, and adroit has been in short supply so far.

The only way he can hope to prevail is by turning away from his lifetime dedication to personal honor and allow his campaign to sow the kind of fear and doubt about Obama that was used against him in South Carolina eight years ago.

Can a man in his seventies change that much? Along the way, McCain may want to consider the rueful wisdom of Adlai Stevenson, who lost the presidency twice half a century ago: "The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning."