December 22, 2007
Article Excerpt
This was not supposed to be John McCain's storyline.
Under his original scenario, he should have had the nomination wrapped up by now. Republicans love to give the mantle to the next person in line, and McCain was it -- and had the Bush-style front-runner's campaign operation in place to make sure it happened.
Then came the implosion -- campaign incompetence building on fund-raising woes to leave McCain on the verge of quitting the race by early summer. Under that scenario, McCain was dead man walking, plodding on with hope only of regaining some measure of pride.
Now he is very much in the mix in New Hampshire. In this extraordinarily scattered Republican field -- one could make a plausible argument that any one of five GOPers will win the nomination -- McCain could be the beneficiary of the chaos, if bewildered Republicans come home to support the candidate they're most familiar with.
How did McCain manage to keep us talking
about him less than two weeks before the caucuses and primaries begin?
Persistence, mostly, and a return of some of the spark that powered him in 2000
before he fell to George W. Bush in the primaries.
The Des Moines Register and The Boston Globe both endorsed him last weekend. Then he made a bigger splash, nabbing the endorsement of Sen. Joe Lieberman -- who, of course, ran for vice president in 2000 and president in 2004, both times as a Democrat.
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