We're not going to beat McCain by making him unlikable.  (That's just not going to happen.)  We're only going to beat him by focusing the contest on how incredibly wrong he is on everything.

I think making him unlikeable is the only way to win. Bush won - kind of, anyway - because he played the likeable guy at the bar.

He was also incredibly wrong about everything. And only a minority of people go that ahead of time. If voters cared about wrong, Bush would never have had more than 30% of the vote.

McCain meanwhile has the advantage of being an obvious patriot and hero. He's white, he's ex-military, he's totally American[tm].

He's also senile and psychopathic. But don't expect voters to care about that.

So the only way to take him down would be to break that identification with America, or to be so very much more charismatic that he becomes insignificant.

Hillary, who is certainly living up to the Lady Macbeth tag, isn't capable of either. Her sniper-fire attempt to play the hero turned into a media farce.

Obama might be. He understands media and rhetoric, while McCain's handlers don't seem quite so deft. And the McCain himself is clearly losing it.

Obama's way to winning is to wrap himself in the flag, run with the 'We're all Americans' line he's been using, and crowd out McCain's media presence. He can then be likeable and quasi-approachable at the same time as he's presidential.

McCain doesn't have that kind of charismatic ammo at his disposal. He'll appeal to the stiff old patriots and the Washington cynics, but not so much to anyone else.