Early Implosion Spotted?

Roger Simon asks, “Does Dick Morris know?”:

I find Dick Morris fun to listen to – he’s witty and willing to go out on a limb. But is he right when he says that John McCain’s campaign has already imploded? The Arizona Senator never even made a dent on the PJM poll, but I thought that might have had to do with the fact our readership doesn’t much care for McCain-Feingold. The general public, however, is unlikely to know what McCain-Feingold even is. And yet they seem to be rejecting McCain. This could be in the area of pure instinct. People react to candidates on a primitive level that transcends issues.

Also, as Morris notes, overexposure is a big danger. Even Obama may already be overexposed. The trick to winning this endless election will be not peaking too early. Either that, or getting so far ahead everybody else just gives up. These are the dual strategies in long-distance racing and seem to apply here.

Mickey Kaus extolls the virtues of last-in=last out accounting in a presidential race:

Smart Tony Blankley piece on how the Faster (and Earlier) election process actually hurts challengers, eroding their traditional advantages. (They get stale quickly, for example. And if they show the beef–policy proposals–there’s lots and lots of time to pick those policies apart, or for them to be overtaken by events.) … The obvious solution, Blankley notes–echoing Emailer X–is to jump into the race late. Advantage, Gingrich and Gore. … Actually, maybe Blankley’s logic suggests a solution for McCain: He could let his campaign collapse, drop out, lay low for a few months … and then jump back in at the end. The Rosie Ruiz Strategy. There’s plenty of time for it. … (True, it didn’t work for Gary Hart in 1988. But McCain wouldn’t be withdrawing because of a character-questioning scandal. He’d be withdrawing because Giuliani seemed fresher and more appealing–at the moment. By December, if Blankley’s right, it would be McCain who seems fresh.) …

It didn’t do much for Ross Perot in 1992, as I recall, either. Although his proto-Rosie Ruiz stategy involved a much shorter timeout, and was accompanied by ravings of covert Republican operatives harrassing his daughter in Area 51 or something like that.

Meanwhile, Rand Simberg ponders if the Clinton campaign “is unaware of the Internet. Well, they shouldn’t be (anyone recall the name Matt Drudge?), but I think they continue to underestimate its power, again, as I’ve noted in the past“.