Letting the clock run out - I hope John McCain doesn't get himself hurt

My friend Carlos has been a basketball referee and baseball umpire around New York City for the last 25 years. Among the things he taught me (besides the fact that Manny Ramirez has been a slugging freak of nature since he was a teenager) was there comes a moment in any game when one team doesn’t want to compete any more.

"You can tell by the body language when they just give up," he’d say. When that happened, he saw his job as making sure nobody got hurt.

The presidential campaign reached that point last Friday. It was John McCain’s "I’m honored to be here with Barack Obama" moment and it was the beginning of the end of his White House run.

I’ve been following presidential politics since 1980 when my dad took me to cast a (pretend) vote for John Anderson and I’ve never seen anything like this campaign. It might be that the two major parties basically have their own cable networks or that those networks run on a six-hour news cycle, but the end result is that in this go-round, a week seems like a year and a month seems like a lifetime. So if you have forgotten what happened last week on the campaign trail, the wind-up doll John McCain picked as his running mate was going around the country claiming that Barack Obama was "palling around with terrorists."

The person she was referring to, William Ayers, was never convicted of any crime. His main connection to Barack Obama comes through Illinois State Sen. Alice Palmer who, over coffee in Ayers’ living room back in 1995, announced she was planning to run for Congress and wanted Barack to be her successor.

Last week the stock market was in a free fall. The Dow was seeing record-breaking losses on just about a daily basis.World leaders were meeting to figure out how to prevent the carnage from spreading around the globe and a McCain strategist said, "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose." So they decided to try to scare people by asking the question, "Who is Barack Obama?"

Of course, anyone who cares already knows who this man is. He’s been on the cover of Vanity Fair, GQ, People, Men’s Vogue, Vibe, Wired, The Atlantic, Ebony, Tiger Beat, Newsweek, and has landed no fewer than seven Time Magazine covers this year alone. He’s been interviewed everywhere from "60 Minutes" to "Access Hollywood," he’s campaigned tirelessly from coast to coast, kicked Bill and Hillary Clinton square in their lying asses, and he’s killing John McCain in national and battleground state polls. Who is Barack Obama? Where have you been for the last year and a half? Alaska?

John McCain has been reduced to asking a question that even kids at Roosevelt Elementary School know the answer to because running on fear is all he has left. In the last month, he’s said the economy is fundamentally strong when we’re in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, pulled out of the state of Michigan and basically conceded 17 Electoral College votes, suspended his campaign and tried to back out of a debate, then attended the debate and re-started his campaign like nothing ever happened.

He’s seen his unfavorable ratings rise and any lead he’s had in any battleground states evaporate. He’s now gotten to the point where he needs to carry Colorado, Nevada, Missouri, Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida to have a chance to win the election — and he’s trailing in all of them.

Which brings us to last Friday. John McCain was at a rally in Minnesota speaking to his supporters in his favorite "town hall" setting where he could wander around waving his arms and talking to his shoes like he loves to do. A guy stood up and said that he and his family were "scared" of an Obama presidency. Sen. McCain’s response was, "I have to tell you he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared (of) as president of the United States."

Then an elderly woman took the mic and said, "I can’t trust Obama...he’s an Arab." John McCain took it right back and said, "No, Ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues." With that, it was over.

I haven’t spoken to Carlos in a while because he’s a Yankee fan and a Republican (and both his teams are really struggling right now), but I’m pretty sure that if tonight’s debate was a basketball game he was working, he’d just be trying to run the clock out before John McCain gets hurt.