Damn, Tom, I guess you didn't get the memo from RNC HQ. There's been a defacto truce as far as keeping the blame for Iraq in the forefront of most of our concerns. Everybody's focused on the end of Bush's term, a shade under 365 days from now. It's almost as if he's heading out the door already, in a psychological sense. There's light at the end of the tunnel, after all these years.

You see the word "change" everywhere on both sides, and I get this sense that a lot of people don't want to jinx it by reverting to the ugly hyperpartisanship of the Bush years. We're on the home stretch now, out of that nightmare. Maybe it's psychologically like wanting to avoid the trick movie ending--we don't want to find out that we didn't drive the stake through the vampire's heart after all.

Did you see Jacob's post on Community? It's like that. I don't think he's just a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

Nice presentation of your evaluation of the candidates. I still can't for the life of me see Romney's appeal--he's nothing but an empty suit--but I'm glad you're willing to at least not jettison McCain if it comes down to it. Nor the appeal of Thompson, that one's even harder to figure. It must be entirely at an instinctive level, some sort of strong father-figure thing, because objectively he just doesn't exhibit the competency that by common consensus any President should have, regardless of party.

When I first read your match-up between McCain and Obama , I thought I read "McCain is grumpy", which to me seems a bigger handicap in that matchup than being, frankly, old. Obama is running in part a "spiritual uplift" campaign, that is, on instilling optimism, and the contrast with even a mildly grumpy old fart could really reflect in his favor.

Haven't forgotten about McCain's stand on Iraq. I posted after one of his debates that I was struck by the deep dichotomy of, on the one hand, his deeply principled stand on torture, in seemingly insane contrast to the other hand brandishing a rifle and pledging eternal war in Iraq. But the mitigating factor is, ironically again, the thing that makes McCain palatable to me and barely palatable to you: He can be reasoned with. He seems like somebody who'll leave overheated and calculated campaign rhetoric behind and make a realistic judgment of the situation once he takes office. His saving grace is that he is a RINO.