Impending Doom!

I cannot shake the feeling that the election will not stop the rancor and partisan fighting that we are now seeing.

I see that my prediction in Febraury was wrong; I thought McCain would win over either Hillary or Barack.

But that won't happen.

McCain looked to change his struggling dynamic when he picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate, but she has shown herself to be more interested in herself than in working with McCain to get him and her elected.

She first went a little off the reservation in a few interviews, then found her voice and never looked back.

At least she's a snappy dresser.

Republicans on the far right seem to really like her, and that shows what is the most wrong with the Republican Party right now.

They are adrift.

They have no center, no rallying point.

They started out despising McCain, and then grudgingly accepted him when it became profoundly obvious that he would be the candidate.

And that was a huge mistake.

He could go his own way more than most Republican candidates because he got the nomination without the far right, and so he did.

He picked a bright, attractive bulldog with no following and no serious credentials as his running mate, just to prove he is a maverick.

Unfortunately, a maverick takes the lead and takes all the arrows, though he blazes the trail for others.

And McCain has blazed the trail to a more centrist Republican candidate in the future than we have seen lately.

The right doesn't know or care to know this, but the center is where most Americans spend all their time.

The left is greedily gathering up the spoils of the war they didn't really win, but that they just failed to lose because they had no power to exercise.

Democrats will abuse their power, just as Republicans have, just as almost anyone does when they get much of it.

And the public will stay near the middle, like they always do, wondering when the politicians will stop bickering and start making sense.