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Desperate advice for McCain.

You might have noticed that Bill Kristol called the McCain campaign "pathetic"...

... and wrote an op-ed saying McCain ought to fire everyone:

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over...

There are still enough doubts about Obama to allow McCain to win. But McCain needs to make his case, and do so as a serious but cheerful candidate for times that need a serious but upbeat leader....

McCain can make the substantive case for his broadly centrist conservatism.....

Let's see what Rush Limbaugh said about that:

What is "centrist conservatism"? I don't know what centrist conservatism is. I think centrist conservatism is probably what Senator McCain believes himself to be. I know he says he's a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution. Let me ask you a question. Throughout this whole campaign... Forget the primaries, 'cause what happened in the primaries is an anomaly. But throughout this whole presidential campaign, when was the one time Senator McCain surged? It was when he moved not to the center, but to the right! When he chose Sarah Palin.

What is it for the first time that actually excited people in the Republican Party about his campaign? It was the selection of Sarah Palin -- and then they hid her for a while. Now, what I hate to see about this... I am not gloating. What I hate to see about this is, this is the exact kind of thing -- this is the exact kind of campaign -- that those of us who had worries about Senator McCain a year ago, six months ago, nine months ago, eight years ago. This is exactly what we saw coming to fruition. But don't forget, there was and there is a battle in the Republican Party for its heart and soul. The country club blue-blood Republican media elites are trying to wrest control of the party from the conservative base that has made the party a dominant (and even landslide victorious) party since the 1980s.

This all has the sound of pre-mature post-mortem.

Full post as published by Althouse on October 13, 2008 (boomark / email).