No, the picture above isn’t evidence of the latest GOP scandal.

One day, this campaign 2004 photo will be considered the photo that helped sink a candidacy. Not since singer Sammy Davis, Jr. hugged a seemingly embarrassed President Richard Nixon has a photo be run and re-run so much by so many, usually with derisive motives in mind. It wouldn’t have had impact if McCain’s once stellar image hadn’t taken a nosedive among many voters for varying reasons.

And now, with news that he’s laying off staff and his campaign funds are lagging, the political obituaries are starting to appear for the McCain campaign.

How did it happen? How did John McCain EVER fall so sharply off the tightrope that had made him a national favorite until the past few months?

Prose Not Hos has a MUST READ analysis of the McCain campaign.

Its opening:

After burning through all but 2 million of 22 million dollars raised and the culmination of a failed campaign with the public guillotining of the longtime senior campaign managers and fifty staffers, the political obituary has been written for the once-heralded media darling. In the past week, the media has attempted to retrace the dance steps it took in 2000 with the upstart Senator branded as the brazenly honest maverick. From Salon to the Washington Post, the question posed is what caused the derailment of the famed Straight Talk Express and the once certain McCain presidential bid?

Its last paragraph:

For many, the past eight years have been a disheartening display of McCain’s willingness to sacrifice his credentials in order to please the Republican elite. The edge that McCain once brought – a willingness to take on corporate corruption, lobbyist influence, and the charlatans of the Evangelical movement — has been dulled by a complacency in being a Bush sycophant, willing to suck down the fumes from a disastrous war, an exceedingly unpopular immigration policy, and economically hobbling tax cuts while Bush speeds away from Pennsylvania Avenue. In essence, the media darling turned into another Bush crony, willing to stoop to new and unnecessary lows in a vain attempt to jockey to be the next Commander in Chief. The McCain implosion is one of his own doing, the consequence of doing business in Washington and misreading the Bush orthodoxy as the key to the White House.

Now read all the sections in the middle.

UPDATE: Thomas Edsall, writing in The Huffington Post, reports that strategists in both parties say McCain’s only choice now is to turn his back on Bush and become the anti-establishment candidate:
According to private conversations with political operatives from both parties, John McCain has no choice but to adopt a high risk strategy to revive his presidential bid, a double Hail Mary: Throw one stink bomb at the White House and another at Republican National Committee headquarters.

There is no guarantee the strategy would work - in fact the odds are long against it.

McCain tried to become the establishment candidate and failed. Fred Thompson is now seeking to fill that vacuum, although the value of that position appears to have dropped sharply. “The collapse of the McCain campaign is simply a metaphor for the disintegration of the entire Republican Party establishment,” conservative public relations strategist Craig Shirley noted.

Rudy Giuliani has become the post-9/11 national security candidate. Mitt Romney, in turn, appears to have locked up Iowa, where a victory will turn him into a competitor elsewhere.

The only place left for McCain is to be the anti-Bush Republican. This was his turf in 2000, and it is far more fertile ground today.
There’s more in the article. But if McCain followed this advice, he’d be like a person who committed political suicide committing suicide again. And it’s likely to happen.

McCain’s problem is not only his positions.

Opposition to him on the war and other policies are also coupled with the fact that he was trusted or reviled in 2000 due to what many felt were his strong beliefs that didn’t quite fit into one party. People who liked him considered him not just another party (Republican or Democratic) hack. People who hated him, considered him a loose cannon who could not be relied on to achieve party goals.

In 2007, he faces a problem that many on both sides don’t think he is a “straight talker” at all but someone who scuttles or hedges on past positions — but not with the skill of a Mitt Romney (who has had more political positions in 2006 than Al Gore had wardrobes in 2000). He is now widely distrusted.

If he pursued this sudden political makeover strategy, McCain could certainly say the words but he’d be further distrusted by GOPers, would never win over many of the independents and even Democrats who once liked him but have now written him totally off as just another Republican pandering to his party’s base, and be repeatedly asked by the press about the timing of this sharp transformation.

He’d be as likely to get the Republican nomination as Michael Moore.