The McCain comeback

If I was a betting man, I’d be very tempted by the 16 to 1 available on John McCain to be the 2008 Republican nominee. McCain has had a fantastic few weeks and is steadily clawing back some of the support he lost earlier in the campaign. He is once more getting some media love—crucial to a campaign that is desperately short of money and so can’t afford much paid for media—and conservatives are beginning to realise that McCain stacks up pretty well against the rest of the field. But perhaps most importantly, McCain has rediscovered his will to win. Earlier in the year it seemed that Iraq and the bitter debate over immigration had drained him of it completely, he looked every bit as old as he is and weary and downbeat to boot. But now he’s got his groove back.

Last night at the Florida Republican debate, McCain turned in his strongest appearance of the campaign to date; reminding viewers of his heroic war service, strong national security credentials and his authenticity. He even won applause for a line distancing himself from President Bush, declaring that “when I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, I saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.” While his attacks on former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who is currently out performing McCain in the key early voting states, hit home. In a zing at Romney’s regular emphasis on his business experience, McCain boasted “I didn't manage for profit, I led for patriotism.” While in one of the more direct attacks of the campaign so far, he called Romney out for his attempt to reinvent himself as a movement conservative when in Massachusetts he had stressed that he was a moderate technocrat: “Governor Romney, you’ve been spending the last year trying to fool people about your record. You can’t – I don’t want you to start fooling them about mine.”

The best moment of the night, though, for McCain came when the audience gave him a spontaneous standing ovation: a pretty much unprecedented event at one of these debates. 

With Rudy Giuliani still facing two huge hurdles, persuading social conservatives to vote for him despite his pro-choice stance and avoiding getting drawn into the sleazy legal problems surrounding his former protégé Bernie Kerik, the race is far from over. If McCain can push past Romney in at least one of early states to emerge as the alternative to Rudy, then he has a decent chance of pulling off a come from behind victory.