McCain banks on close vote as party starts the inquest.

The Republican party have already started their inquest into what went wrong, with Palin vowing to "go rogue" in the last week to make sure the blame doesn't end up around her own throat, and yet McCain insists on Meet The Press that things are going fine.

The Republican presidential nominee predicted a "late night" next Tuesday, suggesting the voting would be close enough to have to wait for the final counts in some states. "This has been a very close race, and I believe I will win it," he said.

Even he doesn't actually believe that, as the evidence on the ground is too strong for even McCain to ignore.

But in a sign of how much of a mismatch the campaign has become, Obama, speaking on Saturday in Albuquerque, New Mexico - won in 2004 by George Bush - attracted a crowd of 45,000. McCain, speaking in the same city the same day drew only about 1,500 onlookers.

The truth is that the only thing we have left to discuss is the size of McCain's defeat and whether or not Obama's victory will do for the Democrats what Reagan's rout did for the Republicans in the early eighties.

538.com this morning give McCain a 3.3% chance of being the next president, which is about as dismal as it gets.

Even Alaska's main newspaper isn't backing the McCain/Palin ticket:

In another blow to McCain's campaign yesterday, the largest paper in Alaska, Sarah Palin's home state, endorsed Obama. The Anchorage Daily News said McCain had "stumbled and fumbled badly" in his response to the economic crisis and Palin was not ready to be vice-president.

The truth is that McCain has fought a simply disgraceful campaign. It was never going to be easy for a Republican to win an election following the damage done to the US by the Bush years, but McCain was a man who had suffered himself at the hands of the Bush/Rove political machine, he was a war hero and, if anyone could offer an alternative to the Obama/Democratic vision for the future it would surely have been him.

Sadly, it didn't turn out that way.

He fought a nasty campaign - one which Rove would have been proud of - based on demonstrable lies, which he continued to repeat even after they were shown to be demonstrable lies.

When he found himself to be behind in the polls he took a disgraceful risk in hiring Sarah Palin as his VP, destroying his argument of "Country First" and the whole notion that Obama was inexperienced.

It's been a train wreck.

His campaign has lacked any basic strategy, and appears to have been founded on the notion that McCain was a POW and Obama is not, so McCain deserves to be president for that reason alone.

David Frum, Bush's speechwriter, who wrote the Axis of Evil speech, suggested yesterday, in an opinion-piece for the Washington Post, that the party shifted resources from the presidential race "that is almost certainly lost" to Senate ones so that there would be a base on which to build a Republican revival after the election. "A beaten party needs a base from which to recover," Frum wrote.

McCain has been unfortunate enough to find himself trying to follow the disgraceful Bush presidency. He has made every attempt to distance himself from the previous Republican administration, but failed to do so because, whilst condemning the Bush years, he has shown himself to be only too willing to embrace their tactics. Bush is possibly the worst American president of all time, certainly he's in the top three of all time stinkers, so anyone attempting to follow him on the Republican ticket was facing a steep climb.

McCain could have fought an honourable campaign, distancing himself from Bush and emphasising the differences between himself and his predecessor. That would have been the only route with which he could have had any chance of victory. By showing that there was a different Republican party that the one which has appalled us all for the last eight years.

He didn't. McCain rather attempted to outdo the lies and smears which have epitomised the Bush years and, in doing so, has destroyed his reputation as an honourable man.

In Pennsylvania, Republicans are distancing themselves from an email sent to Jewish voters comparing a vote for Obama with the events of the 1930s leading to the Holocaust. The email warns of a "second holocaust" if Obama were elected, portraying him as a danger to Israel.

That's the kind of shit that has come to signify this campaign, an "anything goes" philosophy which the American electorate have become utterly disenchanted by.

The Republican party are going down the toilet, and they are going down it whilst insisting on things - "Obama is a Muslim!", "Obama is a terrorist!", "Obama's birth certificate proves he's not even an American!" - that are blatantly untrue.

When any party becomes so insane that it supporters have nothing to cling to other than obvious lies, then it deserves to die.

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Tags: McCain, Obama, US election 2008, lies