The Hollow Man

In this election, it is the character of the candidate that will matter the most.

That, and pretty much that alone, has been the core campaign message Republican candidate John McCain has been peddling to all and sundry for nearly two years. His devotion to this particular talking point has come to resemble the kind of passionate zeal rarely seen beyond the compound walls of survivalist militia groups; and the slavish dedication he has displayed in tolerating the mindless monotony of such endless repetition is matched only by the muddy mooing of sacred cows along the shores of the Ganges River in India.

Clearly, Mr. McCain has become deeply invested in trying to keep the entire presidential campaign conversation focused only on this mantra regarding "Character." To be sure, he has definitely put in the work. He began his second, and presumably final presidential campaign on the second Friday in November of 2006; in the six hundred and sixty one days that have passed since he became a candidate again, his maximum efforts have been focused on flogging the "Character" theme every step of the way.

Presidential races being what they are, it was simply impossible for McCain to remain totally focused on this one-liner sloganeering project. Every rare now and infrequent then, something would come along with enough juice to merit the creation and release of a new statement. The campaign message machine would suddenly swerve out of the "Character counts" slow lane and merge itself into the heavier traffic, passenger-side turn signal blinking away for no good reason as usual, but only for a few miles.

Sooner or later, the bus always veered back into that slow lane, those newer messages eventually died of neglect, and would go floating up to whatever Heaven there may be for topics that were either too hot for a compromised candidate to handle, or were too detailed for a stupid candidate to comprehend. Mr. McCain has evinced both facets of this particular phenomenon on more than a few occasions, most notably during the recent Russia-Georgia crisis. Beyond that, almost every single time some reporter posited queries about Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the entire African continent, or basically anything else pertaining to issues of national security, McCain wound up dropping the informational ball.

There are several very good reasons why McCain would like to keep all debate and discussion in this presidential race right there with him in that slow lane. First and foremost is the simple truth that the man basically has nowhere else to go. His dilemma brings to mind that old maxim trial lawyers have lived and died by since time out of mind: when the law is with you, pound on the law; when the facts are with you, pound on the facts; if neither the facts nor the law are with you, pound on the table. That is John McCain's entire political reality in a nutshell.