I’ve said this before, but it bears saying again:  you have to feel just a little — a little! — sympathy for John McCain’s floundering campaign.  Polls show him falling behind both Rudy Guiliani and Mitt Romney, and now reports are surfacing his fund-raising goals will not be met.  Granted, he’s raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million, no chump change that, but all anyone will remember is the less experience Romney beat him.

McCain blames the shortfall on getting in the race late, but I think it’s more than that.  The voters attracted to McCain are those who believed in the image that McCain was this independent, bold maverick.  What they’ve gotten however is an aging politician willing to sell himself to the devil, or at least far right, in order to get elected.  Unfortunately for McCain, the far right isn’t buying into it and the those who liked his supposed independence are turned off.  That’s not to say Romney and Guiliani have not back-pedaled, but neither has changed their underlying beliefs.