America Letter:The meltdown in John McCain's presidential campaign which saw most of his top advisers resign this week has left the former Republican frontrunner in need of a miracle if he is to win his party's nomination next year.
McCain will probably remain in the race formally until the end of the year, if only so that he can claim federal matching funds to pay off his campaign debts, but his candidacy is now regarded in Washington as effectively dead.
"The physicians have pulled up the sheet; the executors of the estate are taking over," veteran political analyst Charlie Cook wrote in yesterday's National Journal.
Republican rivals Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson may have difficulty in capitalising on McCain's misfortune, however, because all three face potentially serious difficulties of their own.
The immediate cause of McCain's crisis was the disastrous state of his campaign finances, which left him with just $2 million cash in hand this week after raising $24 million during the first six months of this year.
The campaign is expected to announce next week that it owes $1.5 million, leaving McCain with practically nothing to revive his bid for the White House.
McCain had lavish campaign offices in New York and Washington, a bloated staff and a legion of consultants on generous retainers, but it had little else to show for its profligate spending and has yet to air a single television advert. The organisation was oddly amateurish when it came to fundraising and was beset with infighting among senior staff, but McCain's biggest problem as a candidate ran deeper.
Calculating that the Republican base would not anoint a maverick, McCain tried to make peace with key constituencies, including the religious right and became Bush's most fervent ally on the Iraq war. Conservatives were unimpressed, excoriating McCain for his support for immigration reform, while Independents longed for the old, irreverent candidate who almost snatched the nomination from Bush in 2000.
Ten campaign staff resigned on Tuesday, including John Weaver, who had been McCain's closest political adviser since the late 1990s. In an absurd coda, McCain's Florida campaign co-chairman, state representative Bob Allen, was arrested for allegedly offering oral sex to an undercover police officer for $20. Whether this was an innovative form of fundraising or, as Mr Allen says, a misunderstanding based on his three visits to the same public lavatory within half an hour, remains to be seen.
Romney has most reason to cheer at McCain's downfall, not least because the McCain campaign used opposition research to try to strangle the former Massachusetts governor's candidacy at birth. Romney will now engage former senator turned actor Fred Thompson, who has yet to formally enter the race, in a head-to-head fight for the conservative primary vote.
Romney has important advantages, having raised more money than any other Republican and he is ahead in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. He remains in single digits in national polls.
Thompson has caught the conservative imagination in recent months, but his campaign hit what could prove to be an important obstacle last week when it emerged that a lobbying firm he once worked for had represented an organisation that promotes abortion rights.
After denying the claim at first, Thompson changed his story this week, saying he had no recollection of representing the group, exposing himself to allegations of deception as well as political inconsistency.
Giuliani hit back hard this week when the International Association of Fire Fighters released a video cataloguing his alleged failures before, during and after the 9/11 attacks.
"Rudy Giuliani has used a horrible event, September 11th, 2001, to create a carefully crafted persona. But the fact is, what Rudy portrays is not a full picture of the decisions made that led, in our view, to the unnecessary deaths of our FDNY members and the attempt to stop the dignified recovery of those lost," the union's president Harold Schaitberger said.
Giuliani claimed that the union was allowing its traditional support for Democrats to distort its account of 9/11, but as John Kerry discovered after the 2004 Swift Boat ads, a heroic reputation can be hard to recover once it has been undermined, however unfairly.