The strangest thing about John McCain's campaign for president is that it's supposed to be dead, but it isn't. This is a real nuisance for his competitors.
The comeback is not showy or dramatic. And it's true that while McCain is better off than he was in July, when his campaign imploded in a dazzling display of financial mismanagement and staff recriminations, he still faces a more difficult route to the GOP nomination than his well-financed rivals, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.
The evidence?
Nationally, McCain got a boost over the weekend when a new Post-ABC News poll showed him in second place to Giuliani. The former New York mayor had 33 percent; McCain, 19 percent; and the stalled Fred Thompson16 percent. Romney, who leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire, came in at 11 percent, and Mike Huckabee had 9 percent.
So, McCain is at the top of the back-of-the-pack crowd, fourteen points behind, and this is a comeback.
Remember, folks, this is one poll.
Wow.
The rest of Dionne's column is an attempt at a tactical dissection, not of McCain, but of what might be happening in other candidacies because McCain might be coming back. There is no actual research here - I mean, even David Broder pretends to listen to people talking, or places a phone call or two to a "source". Dionne, does nothing but spin out fantasies of what the Romney and Giuliani campaigns might be doing if his thesis that McCain is surging is correct.
Dionne's column ends thusly:
That McCain is still standing is a credit to his persistence. But it is also a symptom of the anxieties and misgivings among Republican voters over the choices they confront in this dark time for their party.
This is a much more honest assessment of what is happening - including the whole "persistence" part - than anything else in the column, except for the poll-quoting business.
I think it is important to note here that Dionne is one of my favorite columnists. He writes well, and thoughtfully, about the intersection of politics and religion. He usually eschews horse race malarkey for serious discussions about policy. Yet here we have an example of the kind of media-love-fest about John McCain that is so galling to so many people. It is one thing to note that McCain isn't sitting in the basement of the polls. It is quite another to insist that McCain - who has as much chance of winning the Republican nomination as I do - is somehow the new "Comeback Kid". He isn't.
As Glenn Greenwald notes today, the real "straight talker" and "maverick" is Ron Paul, who, as Greenwald also notes, is the one who is surging. He is doing so because, unlike McCain, he is not a bullshit artist at whose feet the media bow. This is the column Dionne should have written. That is was not says as much about Washington conventional wisdom, insiderism, and the hollow shell that is so much of our political discourse as Dionne's surprisingly vapid piece.
