It’s Really Over
Rasmussen’s latest Virginia poll should put an end to any doubts about the outcome we are going to see in a couple of weeks. Obama has a 10-point overall lead in the Old Dominion, which has not voted Democratic for President since 1964. Pfotenhauer’s “real” Virginia is getting smaller all the time. His Democratic support in the state has always been much stronger than it has been in some of the old Border states, but now it is at an enviable 96%. More important, he leads among independents by 16. He enjoys a large advantage in fav ratings (64%) over McCain (53%) among independents. Obama is winning men by three and women by 15. He barely edges out McCain among married respondents, but then racks up a 39-point lead among singles. Perhaps we should call it the non-marriage gap instead.

Even 11% of Republicans and 19% of conservatives back Obama. Perhaps Ken Adelman (yes, that Ken Adelman) speaks for some of them:

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

What is most telling about this sizable lead in Virginia is that Obama does not need Virginia to win. So long as he takes Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico and holds the Kerry states, he could lose every other toss-up state and still prevail. McCain must come back, in some cases very dramatically, in all of them. McCain’s task is virtually impossible. Perhaps the campaign knows and accepts this, which is why Palin was on SNL over the weekend being made to serve as something of a prop in her own mocking....

...There is something almost medieval about the way McCain cloaks himself in virtue and treats anyone who questions him as unworthy of public trust. His crusade for campaign-finance reform is a case in point. McCain manipulated the press into bestowing on him the “reformer” mantle and waged a scorched-earth campaign over something relatively superficial, as if it would by itself save America’s troubled democracy. His passion outpaced any perceived benefit. But when McCain gets a notion, he seems to listen only to his inner voices—and staffers and sycophants who echo them. He is always angry at someone, or he is looking for something to be angry about.

McCain’s most devoted supporters hardly disagree—they just think that’s how heroes act. And the candidate himself is dismissive, citing a temperamental streak running through his whole story: “As a young man, I would respond aggressively and sometimes irresponsibly to anyone whom I perceived to have questioned my sense of honor and self-respect.”

But the country faces a more difficult question: Is John McCain’s pattern of volatile behavior simply a matter of style and personality, or is there some underlying cause that makes these well documented traits “driven” and thus dangerous?

Much of the speculation about McCain’s mental status is irresponsible, even defamatory. But there is enough to justify looking through all the smoke to see if his anger is fed by flames he cannot control. Evaluating McCain through this lens makes sense to me. I have worked for a decade as a psychotherapist in a multidisciplinary rehabilitation program for victims of Traumatic Brain Injury. The question with McCain, as with any other possible TBI patient, is about where personality leaves off and organically driven behaviors, if existent, begin. Are his closed-minded, free-reigning passions for causes like campaign finance reform or, more recently, earmarks evidence of determination, a virtue, or obsessiveness, a fearsome attribute in a president?...