Political baseball

I’m a baseball fan, so please allow me the liberty to make an analogy between the current state of the presidential election and a historic moment in baseball.
This week, John McCain said at a rally in Virginia Beach that he has Barack Obama and Joe Biden “just where we want them.”

First of all, if this was McCain’s plan all along, then I’d like to suggest a safer strategy that I like to call “actually trying to win.” It seems a little dangerous to spot your opponent a 10-point lead in the polls before making a move, but I suppose McCain was just trying to make it a fair fight.

But because this is the row he has chosen to hoe, I feel that I might as well offer some advice, in the form of the analogy I mentioned earlier. Sen. McCain, you are the 2004 Boston Red Sox.

Down three games to none in the American League Championship Series to the Yankees, the Sox came back with four wins in a row to take the series and eventually win the World Series. Obviously the senator’s only choice is to grow his hair and beard like Johnny Damon and hope that Alex Rodriguez takes over as Obama’s campaign adviser.

But seriously, there’s no chance that McCain saw this coming, because honestly there couldn’t have been many people who did. The real baseball analogy to make would be the one that Baseball Prospectus and FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver made on The Colbert Report last week, when he compared Obama to the Tampa Bay Rays, a young, up-and-coming team achieving before it was expected to, while all the supposed experts spent the regular season (in Obama’s case, the primaries) writing them off. Silver compared McCain to the Seattle Pilots. They played in 1969 and never again.

Two moves that McCain had backfire are the main reason why he has Obama right where he wants him – Sarah Palin and the scorched-earth assault. Palin looked at first like she was a great move, since far-right Republicans and morons ate her up and boosted McCain’s poll numbers. Of course, people then realized that Palin didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, that she wanted Alaska to secede and that she was kind of a nasty person, and now she has a 56 percent unfavorability rating. Oops.

To make matters worse, the economy tanked, and McCain knows about as much about the economy as he does about Google. Mitt Romney is looking pretty good right now, I’d bet.

Since he fell so far behind, McCain decided he had to “take the gloves off.” Because, as I just mentioned, the economy had just tanked, people were a bit peeved that McCain was basically ignoring it, and his numbers dropped. It probably didn’t help that Palin started yelling about terrorists, either . And all this isn’t even mentioning the campaign suspension/non-suspension fiasco.

Luckily for John McCain, the Rays just beat the Red Sox again, so maybe David Ortiz will be available for some late-inning heroics. Otherwise, it’s getting late early for the Straight Talk Express.