Good news from Bob Beckel

The headline is both cheerful and simple:

Why McCain Can't Win

Democratic operative Bob Beckel makes clear some of the cold, hard political facts I've been trying to explain to hard-headed Republican since February:

The collision of history, the current political climate, and the forces of the conservative right are the seeds that will lay waste to McCain's White House bid. . . .
Ironically, it is McCain's own errors . . . which will be responsible for his political obituary. . . .
What McCain failed to realize was that the right had no intention of embracing him. He had simply spent too many years challenging their out-of-touch agenda. Without conservative support, the press assumed McCain could not win the nomination and his campaign would collapse. Which it nearly did. . . .
Lacking unified Democratic opposition and fortified by an adoring press, McCain has been able to maintain this transparent shadow of his former image.
That will end soon when the Democrats have a nominee who will draw attention to McCain's near total embrace of the Bush agenda. . . .
McCain is now forced to convince the voters that another four years of Bush policies is exactly what the country needs. Democrats, prone to let victory slip away, should give thanks that the reactionaries on the right are still in charge of the Republican agenda.

Beckel is wrong about a great many things, including his characterization of conservatives as "out-of-touch." But where Beckel is absolutely correct is that Crazy Cousin John is the wrong candidate at the wrong time for the Republican Party.

McCain cannot move (further) leftward without losing the GOP's conservative base -- much of which he never had to begin with -- and yet he is already so closely allied with the unpopular president on key issues (notably Iraq) that all Democrats have to do is to paint McCain as the anointed successor to Bush. What McCain faces in November is essentially what happened to Al Gore in 2000, except that the MSM won't be cheerleading for McCain.

The only hope for John McCain to win in November is a self-inflicted implosion on the part of Democrats -- always a possibility, of course, but not much for Republicans to bank on.