Pardon my oscillations.

It’s been a bumpy ride, 2008 has. This election should have been an earthquake, a hurricane, a tsunami – pick your natural disaster metaphor (or combine them for exciting new variations!) – just waiting for the calendar to run out and make it official.

In the end, it looks like that’s how it will be after all. One gets the sense now that the laws of physics are finally reasserting themselves, and modest measures of sanity are stubbornly reclaiming their inevitable places. This is true both in the proximate sense, as Election 2008 now appears to be coming in for a landing, but also more broadly, as the last year or two perhaps mark the end of an era in American politics.

Nevertheless, there have been some weird and therefore scary moments along the way, and those regular readers of this column have been forced to share my personal roller-coaster ride, twisting from highs of modest and tentative hopefulness, sinking to lows of outraged despondency, and back again. And back again, again.

That should never have happened. It has often and accurately been remarked that no Republican should have had the remotest prayer of winning the presidency against any Democrat this year. That idea made a ton of sense a year ago, and fantastically more so a month ago. And yet, miraculously, it was in fact just a month ago that John McCain had recovered from a losing posture and was smiling his Cheshire grin as every significant indicator of the race’s trajectory turned favorable to his election.

He was winning, and, he was doing it the old-fashioned way: through the Grand Old Party’s good old pattern of filthy, cheap politics. Moreover, Barack Obama seemed to be keeping his appointment with destiny by fulfilling the equally time-honored Democratic nominee’s role of watching as his summer lead dissipated, bending over for the full Rovian proctological treatment. Indeed, so anxious was Obama to accommodate Republican needs that he even went the extra step of generously agreeing to be a black man running for president in a still very racist country.

Could this really have been happening yet again? Could Democrats really fall for the same bag of tricks, yet again? Does it really require more than a half-century to figure out how a McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan, Atwater, Rove or Schmidt defeats you? And could it really happen in 2008, of all years, when the public is screaming out for change? Or is it that Democratic presidential candidates are just getting bought off, one by one, taking a payment every four years to go down in the twelfth?

Republicans are also, of course, generally pretty lucky. Reagan was famous for it, and admitted as much. John McCain, another Irishman, has a glass of luck that is both half empty and half full. By rights he should never have had a shot at this, at least since winning the nomination, so even being in contention these last weeks has been a major piece of good fortune. (McCain’s capture of his party’s nomination was itself another piece of major good luck for him, but that’s a different story). On the other hand, the systemic meltdown of the very infrastructure of the American economy could not possibly have been more poorly timed for McCain. This is a hundred year storm we’re talking about, and it picked probably the absolutely most damaging possible month – out of 1200 choices – to hit, from the perspective of the McCain campaign. There is no reason this couldn’t have come in November or December, conveniently after the election. Or a year ago. Even October would have been much better. But by crashing in September, the meltdown has ratcheted up the public’s anxiety and desire for change exponentially, and done so at precisely the moment when the effect is both fresh in voters minds but not so near in time as to get lost in the chaotic swirl of events.

The gods are cruel, aren’t they? McCain never should have had a prayer at all. But they gave him the lead eight years ago, then let a stupid punk with a vicious campaign strategist take it away from him. For two terms since, McCain has crawled into bed with Bush and the entire panoply of right-wing creepery, and the gods rewarded him with the lead for his party’s nomination 18 months ago, then took it away again last summer. Then they gave it back to him yet again, and even allowed him to surpass Obama by a nose in the polls a month ago. Now here they come once more to steal from this 72 year-old Sisyphus his lifetime’s obsession, just as he nears the very crest of the mountain for the very last time.

And well they should, too. One of the most nefarious tactics of the Rove/Schmidt machine is to accuse the other guy of being/doing precisely what you’re being/doing, so that if the Democrat speaks the truth about you, it will all seem like a confusing wash of he-said-she-said to hapless voters. Dig? This explains the newest low in Republican presidential campaign techniques, the “country first” mantra describing McCain (as opposed to the other, non-patriotic, fellow, of course), and McCain’s vile assertion that Obama would rather lose a war for America than lose an election for himself. This regarding the guy who came out against the war back when doing so was possible political suicide, mind you. But the deal is that McCain, and especially his president and party, have in fact themselves politicized the snot out of this war, from the very beginning. Bush and Cheney are actually on record in 1999 talking about the nice benefits to a president’s power and domestic agenda that would accrue from finding a some punky country to invade and kicking ass in a cheap blowout of a splendid little war. Factor in the 2002 war resolution vote held right before the election, the plastic turkey PR campaign, the aircraft carrier stunt and the zillions of photo ops with troops as set pieces, and it only got worse from there over the years. That’s one of the reasons why McCain had to lie about Obama being a traitor to his country. In case Obama ever had the sand to tell the truth about the truly traitorous GOP and the war, McCain’s prior lie would help confuse the issue.

McCain’s tactic is just one of a multitude of desperation plays from a sinking campaign. If it’s true that there are no athiests in foxholes, perhaps it’s also true that there are ethicists in a tanking GOP campaign. Having changed his position on virtually every key political issue of the day in order to win the nomination of a party controlled by lunatics he obviously once despised, having run a series of patently false advertisements that made even his groupies in the mainstream media want to hurl, having hired the very same thugs who had destroyed him in 2000, there’s a very real question as to whether there’s quite anything that McCain wouldn’t do at this point to realize the holy grail of satisfying his personal boyhood career ambition to be president.

And, of course, no truer marker of that exists than the pick of Sarah Palin as running mate. This was an act of extreme and callous destruction, once again purely in service to McCain’s personal ambition. Indeed, I would call it flat-out treason. McCain himself has called the bullshit war on terrorism the ‘transcendental struggle of our time’. He has said that Iraq is the central front in that war. He has said that the chief responsibility of a vice president is to be immediately ready to assume the responsibilities of the presidency. Then he picks someone who, before she was on the ticket – and thus completely bottled up – recently admitted that she doesn’t really know much about Iraq. But she does help him win the presidency. Yeah, treason. I rest my case.

The Palin pick was surely the best marker of McCain’s willingness to mortgage everything imaginable to become president. Unless, that is, one counts the jaw-droppingly cynical roll-out of Palin that’s been used to insulate the campaign from the consequences of their own choice. What is clear is that they knew that she could never be trusted anywhere near a microphone in any sort of spontaneous give-and-take. So they manufactured great umbrage at the investigations and inquiries which naturally followed this choice of an unknown individual to be placed a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency, then cited this outrage as an excuse for keeping her away from the ‘biased’ and ‘hostile’ press. Big, bad, tough, Sarah Barracuda – the same person who might be called upon to deal with the evil North Koreans, Iranians or Russians – has yet to stand up for a single press conference before the American media since being picked for the GOP ticket. As some have noted, that’s actually less than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has done during the same period.

And she undoubtedly won’t be adding to her zero count between now and November 4th. That absurd notion just became easier to sell – precisely per plan – to Fox-watching imbecilic Americans because of the vice-presidential ‘debate’ this last week. Now, after Palin turned in a performance which any semi-literate third grader would find credible, the McCain campaign will declare her lack of press availability to be irrelevant, since she ‘proved’ how knowledgeable she is at the debate.

Still, there are a few loose ends and, indeed, one might ask what’s up with Sarah Palin, anyhow? One minute she’s giving a fiery speech to the Republican convention that – despite the obligatory regressive inanities as content – projects competence and confidence, and the next she is clueless about what the Bush Doctrine is. Then she is wall-to-wall words during the debate, but days before that can’t name a single newspaper that she reads or a single Supreme Court case she objects to beyond Roe versus Wade. What’s the deal? Who is the real Sarah Palin?

The answer is obvious. This is a person with some political skills, a lot of ambition, and almost no knowledge whatsoever of the national and international policy questions which have defined the era of her lifetime. Zip. So, ask her a question for which she has not been pre-scripted, and you will get that excruciating blank face. Ask her a question which involves any sort of intelligent synthesis, independent thinking, personal analysis, and you’ll get just the same. Or, alternatively, you might get some non-answer that either sounds like someone took a paragraph and tossed it into a freakin’ blender, or else has only some remote, tangential connection to one of the words in the query, even if it’s just ‘the’. On the other hand, put her in a scenario where she can practice and memorize and read a script from a teleprompter, or where she can reel out 90 second pre-memorized mini-scripts, and she’s golden, at least for those predisposed to like her.

There were two key moments in the debate which tip off the package-and-bury strategy of the McCain campaign to hide their little family embarrassment. The first was where she ‘boldly’ claimed that she might not answer the questions of the moderator or her opponent, but, doggonit, she was going to have some straight talk with the American people. If you’re stupid or conservative (or more likely both), you could allow yourself to believe that, golly, that gal’s just got a whole lotta spunk! I mean, isn’t it cool how you want to know her position on healthcare and she comes back at you with 90 seconds of recycled Reaganisms on taxes instead! Isn’t she tough! (And let’s not interrupt your fantasy by reminding you how the McCain camp insisted on changing the debate format to one in which there could be no give-and-take or follow-up, or how they managed to cow into submission the already plenty cowed milquetoast Gwen Ifill, by alleging in advance that she was biased because her book has the name ‘Obama’ in the title.)

Then, of course, Palin ended the debate by celebrating how cool these ‘real’ moments are, when she could speak directly to the American people without the ‘filter’ of the press. So subtle, eh? Now we’re all supposed to not be surprised when she declines to be available for press conferences because that whole question-and-answer thing is filtering her relationship with god-fearing Americans who prefer their talk straight. Never mind that the evil press was actually kind enough to filter out – not in – the most embarrassing moments of her cringe-fests with Gibson and Couric.

Sigh. Such is the state of American politics in 2008.

In all of this, there’s bad news, good news and better news. The bad news is that Palin has very likely managed to become a rising figure for years to come in American politics. All she has to do now is hold out for four or five weeks without being further exposed as knowing nothing about the issues people care about, lose the election along with McCain, and then spend the next three years studying up so that she can join the big league bullshitters on the campaign trail in 2012. She’d have a decent shot at winning the nomination at that point, although the GOP nomination for president may be even more worthless in four years than it is now. Of course, if McCain somehow wins this election, Palin would be running at some point as a sitting vice president. In either scenario, don’t even get me started on what a depressing barometer this is for the state of the American polity. This is an ambitious former sportscaster (literally) and beauty pageant contestant (also literally), with all the genuine sincerity of a junior high pep rally (“Go Team! Beat Other Team!”). Do I really, gulp, live in a country where the likes of Sarah Palin are seriously considered for the highest office in the land?

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Palin’s avoidance of self-immolation during the debate didn’t do her any good apart from engineering her tenuous survival, and it didn’t do the McCain ticket any good either. Most viewers thought she lost the debate, hands-down, and continue to believe she is not prepared to be vice president. Perhaps there is some hope, after all.

More importantly, every key indicator now shows McCain in free-fall over the last weeks. He is polling anywhere from four to eleven points behind Obama, depending on the survey you look at. Moreover, the smart money – which is literally what it is – at Intrade now is betting on Obama with 68 to 32 percent favorability odds. Several weeks ago McCain actually led by a few points in that ratio. Now he’s getting clobbered. Most importantly, of course, is the Electoral College map, which is now squeezing McCain like a Brooklyn loan shark. If the vote were held today, state-by-state polls show Obama taking 338 electoral votes (with 270 necessary to win the presidency) to McCain’s 185, a royal trouncing. The four mid-large swing states that generally hold the key to any modern presidential election – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida – have all turned blue, to the point where McCain has even thrown in the towel and exited Michigan. Likewise, the key swing states from the next size tier down – New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada – are also now polling blue, every one of them.

Remarkably, even Virginia is now leaning in favor of Obama. And, by the way, that 338-185 tally leaves 15 electoral votes unaccounted for. These belong to North Carolina, now in a statistical dead heat. North Carolina! How bad is a GOP candidate hurting when he’s fighting to stay alive in North Carolina, home of decades-long senator from the paleolithic, Jesse Helms?

This means that, barring an October Surprise or something of the same magnitude, Obama will be the next president, perhaps by a considerable margin (and, coupled with congressional gains for Democrats, in what may be a landmark election). Unfortunately, the McCain campaign knows this too. He has so far demonstrated his willingness to do or say anything to win the presidency, and that will certainly be the agenda of the next month, as the aspersions regarding Obama’s past associations are going to be trotted out in what history might come to refer to as Rove’s Last Stand.

The question – still very much unanswered, for my money – is whether Obama has the stones and the smarts to parry with trailer trash. He has to frame and innoculate, so that every time McCain goes south it only hurts the shipper, not the receiver. The killer line that Obama has to pull out at the appropriate moment in the next debate, spoken with a hint of kind sorrowfulness, is this: “You know, John, lately it seems like you’ll say or do anything to win the presidency”. Those sixteen words would seal the election for good and for permanent. They will resonate with the public and the press, who already agree with that sentiment, they will destroy what is still McCain’s most potent weapon – the myth of his good character – and they will disarm him from being able to use the last remaining arrows in his quiver without having them turn into boomerangs. One sentence, and it will be game over. This would be the “You’re no John Kennedy” of 2008.

If Obama can do that, and if he can win this election, especially resoundingly, the even better news may be that regressive politics are buried for a generation. Stupidly, Democrats and mainstream liberals have refused to fight a battle against a wholly and manifestly failed complete ideological package. Thus, they have left the high ground of framing to the right, they have been forced into a rear-guard independent skirmish on every issue, and they have failed to articulate a coherent alternative world view.

Maybe that is a task for after the election, though I have a hard time seeing Democrats ever being that smart or that gutty.

And Obama has been absolutely emblematic of that tendency. What does he stand for, other than not being Bush? I see little beyond vague platitudes and a promise to return to better times. If he wins, it will have been largely by being tactically smart and strategically too coy by half, standing safely still and allowing the regressive alternative to implode before our very eyes.

A win is a win, of course. But if, after eight years of George W. Bush, two failed wars, Hurricane Katrina, massive debt, torture, incompetence and corruption – if after all that you still need a hundred-year systemic meltdown of the economic system to edge you over the top in order to defeat a wrinkled old political whore peddling more of the same ugly crap – then no one should accuse you of running a brilliant campaign.

And that matters. Because a big mandate creates political space within which to implement a progressive agenda, while Obama will enter office with almost no mandate other than to be vaguely sensible and moderate in all things.

It matters because the best clue we have so far of how Obama would govern is how he has run.

There’s a word for both. But, unfortunately, these are not times which call for timidity.