Meanwhile, Mr. McMaverick Has Big Problems

This should be the best of times for John McCain. After all, the presumptive Republican nominee has pretty much gotten a free ride from the news media while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have duked it out, but the septuagenarian’s campaign is sprouting problems like zits on the face of a 15-year-old.

To wit:

* His biggest liability is Mister Twenty-Seven Percent, yet George Bush keeps stepping on his lines.

* His best chance against Obama is to sell himself as a straight-talking maverick, but the record shows that he has been anything but.

* The organization of his campaign has been so slipshod that he is bleeding top advisors because of their embarrassingly unsavory past and present associations.

* He has big money problems, as in not having nearly enough himself and his wife’s “f— you” refusal to release her financial records.

* His recent flip-flop on troop withdrawals from Iraq shows how vulnerable he is on this increasingly unpopular war.

* He keeps undermining himself because of his inability or unwillingness to master the finer points of policy, including the economy and foreign affairs.

* He is being pressured to enlist in the right-wing’s sputtering culture war, including blasting the California same-sex marriage decision, and risks further alienating the GOP’s lunatic fringe if he does not.

* He could be seriously hurt by an increasingly likely third-party presidential bid.

* He has no coattails, which means that the many vulnerable Republicans up for re-election are more or less on their own. That might not be a bad thing considering how problematic this candidacy is.