It's always good to incorporate Muhammad Ali into political commentary

Cross-posted from Jelly-Town!

You know what's a pretty good sign that your presidential campaign may be on its way to joining the other great disasters in history? You're being shown up by Paris Hilton.

Listen, its been predetermined for a long time that my November vote is committed to the candidate with the "D" in closest proximity in their name (as opposed to a candidate with a lot of D's in his name), so there's my bias. Still, coming in to this campaign, I liked John McCain. This even though I strongly disagree with many of his policy stands and recognize that his tendency towards hateful comments under the phony cover of being a maverick straight shooter (hiding behind behind self-awareness of your his character flaws doesn't cut it either) long before he made flippant remarks about cigarettes exported with Farsi printing on the package. Still, any Republican willing to team up with my favorite Senator to champion campaign finance legislation that was disproportionately more damaging to his own party is worthy of some respect. Besides, he really does deserve a chance at this after being Cobra-Kai-ed out of race by the slimeball who's sullied the Oval Office for the past eight years. Whatever his (many) faults, McCain has always seemed to be a politician who operated with as much integrity as was possible and still remain gainfully employed in that often odorous field.

Given that, it's been wholly unpleasant to watch him flounder through this campaign, unable to get any sort of footing, drastically changing long-held positions and even bereft of any capability to get the members of his team to agree on fundamental matters of policy. He's stooped to such juvenile tactics--not just the original ad which invited Ms. Hilton into the fray of presidential politics, but the asinine tire gauge mockery that he almost immediately had to back off of--that Barack Obama has been able to respond to him with the equivalent of repeating "Really?" over and over again.

That response reminded me of a story George Foreman told about his historic "Rumble in the Jungle" title fight against Muhammad Ali. Foreman had been pummeling Ali for several rounds, unaware that Ali was employing the rope-a-dope strategy. Shortly before Ali turned the fight around, he leaned into Foreman during a clinch and said something to the effect of "Is that all you got, George? I'm disappointed. Is that all you got?" According to Foreman, at that moment he thought, "Yep, that's about it." Ali knocked Foreman out in the eighth round.

Things could easily turn around--there's a whole lot that can happen between now and November--but right now it's easy to imagine Obama asking "Is that all you got?" and McCain responding "Yep, that's about it."