McCain Rushes Campaign to Nowhere

[DogPoundPup]

by Juan Cole

Mao Zedong announced the adage by which John McCain is clearly living now: "The enemy advances, we retreat. / The enemy camps, we harass. / The enemy tires, we attack." Mao was describing not a conventional but a guerrilla war, and McCain is now unexpectedly playing the Filipino insurgents of 1899 to Obama's America. Guerrilla wars are waged by the weak but wily. McCain has all but announced that his conventional campaign has crashed and burned. We do not know if the prepping for the debate was a disaster, or it turns out you really can't let Palin be interviewed freely by normal people, or whether terror set in that a second great depression will turn the country starkly to the left for the foreseeable future.

snip~
McCain's retreat has been hasty and poorly planned, so that it looks more like a rout than a clever guerrilla movement. Not all guerrilla wars succeed, after all-- the Philippines was subdued by US forces with long hard fighting. McCain, having lost to a guerrilla war, may now face the irony that he is not only not successful in conventional struggles, but has not mastered the form of his greatest enemies.

And the American public, who had expected him to stand his ground and fight, had been expecting an Eisenhower, not a Ho Chi Minh, will hardly be delighted.
http://www.juancole.com/2008/09/mccain-rushes-campaign-to-nowhere.html