Virginia: Not the day the McCain-Paliners were hoping for

Column by Chris Graham
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Twenty thousand people, give or take, showed up to hear Sarah Palin at the Richmond International Raceway today. Good news. She yelled at some of them who were trying to tell her to speak “Louder! Louder!” because they couldn’t hear her and called them protestors while making a snarky remark about the commotion that had ensued. Not good news.

The fact that Palin and head of the ticket John McCain had to be in Virginia at all was the bad news today – on the eve of Virginia going blue for the first time in 44 years, with Democrat Barack Obama leading the Republican McCain in the state polls by eight to ten points.

More bad news for the McCain side – the new tax-cut plan that the candidate was supposed to unveil today in Virginia Beach ended up being left entirely on the cutting-room floor. Politico.com reported today that it is not known what happened to apparently derail the plan, which had been talked up by McCain senior advisers in media interviews over the weekend and also on the Sunday-morning talk shows by campaign surrogates and had been talked up by some in the GOP as something that might help turn the negative poll numbers for McCain around.

Even more bad news for McCain-Palin – the column by conservative columnist and Fox News contributor/GOP cheerleader William Kristol in today’s New York Times suggesting that the last best chance for McCain to win is for him to fire his top campaign staff and start over. The column now makes it two Fox News contributors/GOP cheerleaders who have jumped from the McCain-Palin ship in recent weeks. Charles Krauthammer wrote in a column earlier this month in the Washington Post that McCain’s campaign was too much about Hail Mary passes and razzle-dazzle gadget plays in contrast to the cool, calm, collected, reasoned approach marked by the Obama campaign.

And then there’s the news on the national scene – which has Obama opening up a seven and a half point lead in RealClearPolitics.com’s poll of polls, with the lead stretching to as much as 11 points in a Newsweek poll and 10 points each in Gallup and ABC News/Washington Post.

Wonder how many of those “protestors” in Richmond today might decide it’s not worth the trouble, considering all the bad news that’s out there …