Outside the cloakroom, McCain looked over and saw Brownback reaching for his cloak.  The Senator from Kansas appeared to be deep in thought.  McCain kept walking.  He had a few quandaries of his own.  Truth to tell, he didn't much care for Hagee or the clown who kept repeating Obama's middle name when all the young people could be seen in the background, holding up a damn "McCain" sign.  Who the hell came up with that? Screw it, he decided.  The solidarity theme got plain old ridiculous at times.  In fact, the whole campaign, from start to finish, was a major pain in the behind.  Yet he had no choice but to soldier on with the Iraq theme, telling people, "no surrender," and hoping that the scare tactics worked.  If he changed course at some point and said that he wanted to get out, that the enterprise was a drain on the public treasury, then Democrats would hurl the flip-flop label and frankly, so would everyone else.  No choice there: no surrender.  Right? The thing with Hagee, though, wasn't good.  Catholics were an argumentative bunch and they wouldn't care for it at all...not that they were easy to pin down.  He tried to run through it, thinking of the Catholic mindset.  You had the minority sort of literal-thinking types like Brownback, who didn't object to fundamentalists so much, but even Sam had seemed mildly irritated.  And the rest of the Catholic types would undoubtedly be turned off.  You had the scholarly liberal types who'd be voting Democratic, anyway.  They'd do it on judges alone, even if they didn't like the candidate.  The scholarly conservative types? Well, they wouldn't like Hagee.  The armageddon business was too much.  Somewhere along the line, most Catholics had been exposed to the metaphorical way of looking at things, and they landed in the middle of the spectrum.  Plus, Hagee was a dork.  That guy the other day, up on stage, was even a bigger dork.  McCain was trying to round up dorks.  He needed endorsements from dorks.  That was what everybody said.  Then he realized something: in the conversation with Brownback, he'd somehow left the room without his cloak.  He wanted a new cloak.  The one he wore now didn't fit.