In a season of ironies, the greatest of all might be that john McCain lacks the toughness to get elected president. During the summer, when he had his best chance, he wasn't tough enough to remake the Republican Party in his own image; instead, he surrendered to a cynical assortment of lobbyists and right-wingers who insisted on a strategic blunder that McCain would recognize from his reading of military history-fighting the last war. In 2004 President Bushwon by rallying the base and destroying the Democrat as unpatriotic. They would try to do it again. But the free-market party of Reagan is dead (thanks to the financial crisis) and the resentment party of Nixon (in the form of the ugly attacks unleashed by McCain and Sarah Palin) may find that its best days are behind it. Where is the party of McCain? The man who survived five and a half years as a Vietnam POW and a thousand political battles is being crushed by a dying elephant.
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