My Friends,

There's nothing like looking at how a candidate runs his campaign for clues about how he'll govern. and now, Straight-Talking War Hero John (callsign: "Maverick") McCain (he was tortured for his country, you know) has given us some insight into how he will balance the budget.

He'll cook the books. It's a fine old tradition of the Grand Party of Old.

As we've seen, McCain recently had a little chat with his peeps to assure them that if you add what he's raised to what the RNC raised, and compare it to Obama's fundraising plus the DNC's fundraising, he's ahead.

Or, more in more straight-talkerly terms, he's cooking the books and serving them up with a side of deep fried Enron to satisfy his worried base.

Now I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the fac that the DNC's fundraising continues to suck. I am somewhat worried that the protracted primary sucked a lot of money into the warchests of both candidates that would otherwise gone to the DNC. Let's face it: there's just some giving fatigue going and a lot of it was fueled by the high-octane adrenelene we were all running on until the poll closed. But I'm a lot more worried about the evident fact that Hillary's richest supporters seem to be among those having the hardest time getting to the end of the Kubler-Ross cycle. Candidates get small donations. Abstract enetities like the DNC and the RNC run off of big donations from people who don't think they're big donations. (And I haven't forgotten that an awful lot of them were making some pretty ugly threats about witholding that money from the party at various stages of the campaign.)

However, the fact remains that McCain is cooking the books. Head to head, Obama apparently continues to out-raise him. (Mav wouldn't be cooking the books if he were winning a head to head, right?) The Democratic nominee is out-raising the Republican. That means that an awful lot of rich Republicans cannot bring themselves to donate to McCain and are, instead, dumping cash into the RNC, and it means that McCain is not getting any love from the less rich Republicans. The party of "money talks, merit walks" can't bring themselves to put their money on McCain.

There's your "enthusiasm gap" in action folks.

But there's more.

McCain also boasts that he's outspending Obama 3:1 on TV ads and yet his campaign's expenses are ten million less per month than Obama's.

They're talking like they think this is a good thing. Hopefully they really believe it.

McCain's outspending Obama 3:1 on TV ads because states Bush won, and he should be winning, are in play or are being lost by him. He is spending this money playing defense, not offense. And if Obama's spending ten million more a month than McCain while being outspent on TV 3:1, the question arises "where's it all going?" Well, it ain't going for beer and pretzels folks. Its going into the ground game. Its going, in other words, to lay the groundwork necessary to do to McCain nationwide what Bush did to Kerry in Ohio.

Back at the end of last month, Obama reopened all of his field offices here in NC, a state that's in play but hardly one where he's given a better than 50-50 chance. McCain doesn't even have an effing field office in North Carolina. North Carolina is an absolute must win state for him, its in play and he doesn't even have a single damn field office in the whole effing state. Here in the middle of the the second most conservative part of the state, I have seen exactly one McCain bumper sticker. I've actually seen more Obama stickers since the primary than I did before it. Christ, I still see more Bush-Cheney stickers than I do McCain stickers. Either through lack of enthusiasm, lack of a ground game or both, even the local twenty-eight percenters haven't even had the gumption to add a McCain sticker to their collection.

And, of course, if Obama's money spigot dries up, we're all hosed. But it's just plain stupid to start doing the the Democrat Chicken Little Dance because McCain did some Enron accounting and manufactured a number bigger than the one he manufactured for Obama. Especially when the reason he's finally got some beans and bullets stored up in the supply dump to boast about is because he's got no soldiers in the trenches to eat those beans or shoot the bullets.