McCain Campaign is a Mess

The 2008 Presidential campaign of John McCain is showing one of the worst aspects of the Bush administration: a stunning lack of competence. Newsweek's Howard Fineman assesses the damage from the campaign's latest stumble.

This was supposed to be John McCain's week to re-re-launch his campaign, this time with a tightly focused message about the economy and how he plans to fix it. He had a nicely staged debut in Denver, even if the experts quickly demanded to know how he could preserve George Bush's tax cuts, stay in Iraq and yet balance the federal budget by 2013. Details, details! Still, McCain was back in the game.

Then a one-man thundercloud named Phil Gramm rained on McCain's Main Street parade.

In one of the more boneheaded remarks in recent presidential politics (and Gramm has uttered others) the former Texas senator declared that we are in the midst of a "mental recession" and that we have "sort of become a nation of whiners."

The McCain campaign recently reorganized for the second time. FactCheck.org has repeatedly slammed McCain for distorted, misleading rhetoric on a number of issues. Robert Gordon and James Kvaal detailed the ways in which McCain has taken opposing sides of issues like taxes and health care simultaneously in The New Republic. As the campaign's mis-steps pile up, how long can McCain hope to stay withing striking distance (single digits) of Barack Obama?