Poor John McCain. He was doomed from the start, wasn’t he. After the most disastrous 8 years in the history of the White House it must be very, very hard indeed to get people to vote for someone from the same party. And while he’s at it, he probably feels pretty bad.

John McCain has tried to distance himself from Bush. He has said over and over that he is not George W. Bush. He has a different point of view from the current president in a multitude of important issues, but the fact remains; if McCain is elected there will be a new Republican president. That is not exactly a new beginning, is it?
It doesn’t end there. President Bush’s popularity is now at 23%. That is 3% below Richard Nixon on the day he resigned from the presidency in 1974. Bush has made the political environment so bad for all republicans, even someone so fundamentally different from himself like McCain, who actually ran against him in 2000.

The other obstacle for John McCain is Sarah Palin. She has so little support outside the republicans in Alaska and has become a bit of a liability after a series poorly conducted media interviews. Not quite the Hillary effect McCain was aiming for.